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TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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TURKEY: 

A PAST AND A FUTURE 



BY 

A. J. TOYNBEE 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS IN AMERICA FOR HODDER & STOUGHTON 

MGMXVII 






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CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I The Past i 

II The Present i5 

III The Future 4° 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 



TURKEY: 
A PAST AND A FUTURE 



I 

WHAT IS Turkey? It is a name which explains 
nothing, for no formula can embrace the va- 
riety of the countries marked "Ottoman" on 
the map : the High Yemen, with its monsoons and 
tropical cultivation; the tilted rim of the Hedjaz, 
one desert in a desert zone that stretches from the 
Sahara to Mongolia ; the Mesopotamian rivers, break- 
ing the desert with a strip of green; the pine-covered 
mountain terraces of Kurdistan, which gird in Mesopo- 
"• tamia as the hills of the North-West Frontier of India 
gird the Plains; the Armenian highlands, bleak as 
the Pamirs, which feed Mesopotamia with their snows 
and send it the soil they cannot keep themselves; the 
Anatolian peninsula — an offshoot of Central Europe 
with its rocks and fine timber and mountain streams, 
but nursing a steppe in its heart more intractable than 
the Puszta of Hungary; the coast-lands — Trebizond 
and Ismid and Smyrna clinging to the Anatolian main- 
land and Syria interposing itself betv/een the desert and 
the sea, but all, with their vines and olives and sharp 
contours, keeping true to the Mediterranean; and then 
the waterway of narrows and land-locked sea and nar- 
, rows again which links the Mediterranean v^ith the 



a TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

Black Sea and the Russian hinterland, and which has 
not its like in the world. 

The cities of Turkey are as various as the climes, 
with the added impress of many generations of men: 
Adrlanople, set at a junction of rivers within the circle 
of the Thracian downs, a fortress since its founda- 
tion, well chosen for the tombs of the Ottoman con- 
querors; Constantinople, capital of empires where races 
meet but never mix, mistress of trade routes vital 
to the existence of vast regions beyond her horizon — 
Central Europe trafficking south-eastward overland 
and Russia south-westward by sea; Smyrna, the port 
by which men go up and down between Anatolia and 
the iEgean, the foothold on the Asiatic mainland which 
the Greeks have never lost; Konia, between the moun- 
tain girdle and the central steppe, where native Ana- 
tolia has always stood at bay, guarding her race and 
religion against the influences of the coasts; Aleppo, 
where, if Turkey were a unity, the centre of Turkey 
would be found, the city where, if anywhere, the races 
of the Near East have mingled — building their courses 
into her fortress walls from the polygonal work of the 
Hittite founders to the battlements that kept out the 
Crusaders — and now the half-way point of a railway 
surveyed along an immemorially ancient route, but 
unfinished like the history of Aleppo herself; Van 
by its upland lake, overhanging the Mesopotamlan 
lowlands and with the writing of their culture graven 
on its cliffs, yet living a life apart like some Swiss 
canton and half belonging to the Infinite north; Bag- 
dad, the incarnation for the last millennium of an 
eternal city that shifts Its site as Its rivers shift their 
beds — from Seleucia to Bagdad, from Babylon to Sc- 



TUMKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 3 

leucia, from Kish to Babylon — hut which always 
springs up again, like Delhi, within a few parasangs 
of its last ruins, in an area that is an irresistible focus 
of population; Basra amid its palm-groves, so far 
down stream that it belongs to the Indian Ocean — 
the port from which Sinbad set sail for fairyland, 
and from which less mythical Arab seamen spread 
their religion and civilisation far over African coasts 
and Malayan Indies; these, and besides them almost 
all the holy cities of mankind: Kerbela, between the 
Euphrates and the desert, where, under Sunni rule, the 
Shias of Persia and India have still visited the tombs 
of their saints and buried their dead; Jerusalem, where 
Jew and Christian, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant, 
Armenian and Abyssinian, have their common shrines 
and separate quarters; Mekka and Medina in the 
heart of the desert, beyond which their fame would 
never have passed but for a well and a mart and a 
precinct of Idols and the Prophet who overthrew them ; 
and there are the cities on the Pilgrim Road (linked 
now by railway with Medina, the nearer of the Hara- 
mein) : Beirut the port, with Its electric trams and 
newspapers, the Smyrna of the Arab lands; and Da- 
mascus the oasis, looking out over the desert instead 
of the sea, and harbour not of ships but of camel- 
caravans. 

The names of these cities call up, like an incanta- 
tion, the memory of the civilisations which grew In 
them to greatness and sank in them to decay: Meso- 
potamia, a great heart of civilisation which is cold to- 
day, but which beat so strongly for five thousand 
years that Its pulses were felt from Siberia to the 
Pillars of Hercules and Influenced the taste and 



4 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

technique of the Scandinavian bronze age; the Assyr- 
ians, who extended the political marches of Mesopo- 
tamia towards the north, and turned them Into a mlH- 
tary monarchy that devastated the motherland and all 
other lands and peoples from the Tigris to the sea; 
the Hebrews, discovering a world-rehgion In their 
hill-country overlooking the coast; the Sabseans, whose 
queen made the first pilgrimage to Jerusalem, coming 
from Yemen across the Hedjaz when Mekka and 
Medina were still of no account; the Philistines and 
Phoenicians of the Syrian sea-board, who were discov- 
ering the Atlantic and were too busy to listen to the 
Hebrew phophets In their hinterland; the lonlans, who 
opened up the Black Sea and created a poetry, philoso- 
phy, science, and architecture which are still the life- 
blood of ours, before they were overwhelmed, like the 
Phoenicians before them, by a continental military 
power; the Hittites, who first transmitted the fruitful 
influences of Mesopotamia to the Ionian coasts — a peo- 
ple as mysterious to their contemporaries as to our- 
selves, maturing unknown in the fastnesses of Anatolia, 
raising up a sudden empire that raided Mesopotamia 
and colonised the Syrian valleys, and then succumb- 
ing to waves of northern Invasion. All these people 
rose and fell within the boundaries of Turkey, held 
the stage of the world for a time, and left their mark 
on Its history. There is a romance about their names, 
a wonderful variety and Intensity In their vanished life; 
yet they are not more diverse than their modern suc- 
cessors. In whose veins flows their blood and whose 
possibilities are only dwarfed by their achievements. 

There were less than twenty million people In Tur- 
key before the V/ar, and during It the Government 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 5 

has caused a million or so to perish by massacre, star- 
vation, or disease. Yet, in spite of this demoniac ef- 
fort after uniformity, they are still the strangest con- 
geries of racial and social types that has ever been 
placed at a single Government's mercy. The Ottoman 
Empire is nam.ed after the Osmanli, but you might 
search long before you found one among its inhabi- 
tants. These Osmanlis are a governing class, indige- 
nous only in Constantinople and a few neighbouring 
towns, but planted here and there, as officers and 
officials, over the Ottoman territories. They come of 
a clan of Turkish nomads, recruited since the thirteenth 
century by converts, forced or voluntary, from most of 
Christendom, and crossed with the blood of slave- 
women from all the world. They are hardly a race. 
Tradition fortified by inertia makes them what they 
are, and also their Turkish language, which serves 
them for business of state and for a literature, though 
not without an infusion of Persian and Arabic idioms 
said to amount to 95 per cent, of the vocabulary.* 

This artificial language is hardly a link between 
Osmanli officialdom and the Turkish peasantry of 
Anatolia, which speaks Turkish dialects derived from 
tribes that drifted in, some as late as the Osmanlis, 
some two centuries before. Nor has this Turkish- 
speaking peasantry much in common with the Turkish 
nomads who still wander over the central Anatolian 
steppe and have kept their blood pure; for the peas- 
antry has reverted physically to the native stock, which 
held Anatolia from time Immemorial and absorbs all 
newcomers that mingle with it on its soil. Thus there 

*Tekin Alp: *'The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal" (Weimar: 
Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1915). The percentage is of course an ex- 
aggeration. 



6 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

are three distinct "Turkish" elements in Turkey, di- 
vided by blood and vocation and social type ; and even 
if we reckon all who speak some form of Turkish as 
one group, they only amount to 30 or 40 per cent, of 
the whole population of the Empire. 

The rest are alien to the Turks and to one another. 
Those who speak Arabic are as strong numerically 
as the Turks, or stronger, but they too are divided, 
and their unity is a problem of the future. There are 
pure-bred Arab nomads of the desert; there are Arabs 
who have settled in towns or on the land, some within 
the last generation, like the Muntefik In Mesopotamia, 
some a millennium or two ago, like the Meccan Kore- 
Ish, but who still retain their tribal consciousness of 
race ; there are Arabs In name who have nothing Ara- 
bic about them but their language — most of the peas- 
antry of Syria are such, and the Inhabitants of an- 
cient centres of population like Damascus or Bagdad; 
in Syria many of these "Arabs" are Christians, and 
some Christians, though they speak Arabic, have re- 
tained their separate sense of nationality — notably the 
Roman Catholic Maronites of the Lebanon — and 
would hardly be considered as Arabs either by them- 
selves or by their neighbours. The same is true of 
the Druses, another remnant of an earlier stock, which 
has preserved its Identity under the guise of Islam so 
heretically conceived as to rank as an Independent re- 
ligion. As for the Yemenis — they will resent the im- 
putation, for no Arabs count up their genealogies so 
zealously as they, but there Is more East African than 
Semitic blood In their veins. They are men of the 
moist, fertile tropics, brown of skin, and working half 
naked In their fields, like the peoples of. Southern In- 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 7 

dia and Bengal. And on the opposite fringes of the 
Arabic-speaking area there are fragments of popula- 
tion whose language is Semitic but pre-Arabic * — the 
Jacobite Christians of the Tor-Abdin, and the Nesto- 
rians of the Upper Zab, who once, under the Caliphs, 
were the industrious Christian peasantry of Mesopo- 
tamia, but now are shepherds and hillmen among the 
Kurds. The Kurds themselves are more scattered 
than any other stock in Turkey, and divided tribe 
against tribe, but taken together they rank third in 
numerical strength, after the Arabs and Turks. There 
are mountain Kurds and Kurds of the plain, husband- 
men and herdsmen, Kurds who have kept to their 
original homes along the eastern frontier, and Kurds 
who, under Ottoman auspices, have spread themselves 
over the Armenian plateau, the North Mesopotamian 
steppes, the Taurus valleys, and the hinterland of the 
Black Sea. 

The chief thing the Kurds have in common is the 
Persian dialect they speak, but it is usual to class as 
Kurds any and every community in the Kurdish area 
which is not Turkish or Arab and can by courtesy be 
called Moslem (the Kurds, for that matter, are only 
Moslems skin-deep). Such communities abound: the 
Dersim highlands, in particular, are an ethnographical 
museum; "Kizil-Bashi" is a general name for their 
kind; only the Yezidis, though they speak good Kurd- 
ish, are distinguished from the rest for their idiosyn- 
crasy of worshipping Satan under the form of a pea- 
cock (Allah, they argue, is good-natured and does not 



* In the sense of having preceded Arabic in this region, for in it- 
self, and in its original area, Arabic is as old a language as any 
other variety of Semitic, 



8 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

need to be propitiated) and they are repudiated with 
one accord by Moslem and Christian. 

But not all the scattered elements In Turkey are 
Isolated or primitive. The Greeks and Armenians, for 
instance, are, or were, the most energetic, intellectual, 
liberal elements In Turkey, the natural intermediaries 
between the other races and western civilisation — 
"were" rather than "are," because the Ottoman Gov- 
ernment has taken ruthless steps to eliminate just these 
two most valuable elements among its subjects. The 
urban Greeks survive In centres like Smyrna and Con- 
stantinople, but the Greek peasantry of Thrace and 
Anatolia has mostly been driven over the frontier since 
the Second Balkan War. As for the Armenians, the 
Government has been destroying them by massacre and 
deportation since April, 19 15 — ^business and profes- 
sional men, peasants and shepherds, women and chil- 
dren — without discrimination or pity. A third of the 
Ottoman Armenians may still survive ; a tenth of them 
are safe within the Russian and British lines. Fortu- 
nately half this nation, and the majority of the Greeks, 
live outside the Ottoman frontiers, and are beyond 
the Osmanli's power. 

To compensate for Its depopulation of the countries 
under its dominion, the Ottoman Government, during 
the last fifty years, has been settling them with Mos- 
lem Immigrants from Its own lost provinces or from 
other Moslem lands that have changed their rulers. 
These "Mouhadjirs" are reckoned, from first to last, 
at three-quarters of a million, drawn from the most 
diverse stocks — Bosniaks and Pomaks and Albanians, 
Algerlnes and Tripolltans, Tchetchens and Circassians. 
Numbers have been planted recently on the lands of 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 9 

dispossessed Armenians and Greeks. They add many 
more elements to the confusion of tongues, but th^y 
are probably destined to be absorbed or to die out. 
The Circassians, In particular, who are the most in- 
dustrious (though most unruly) and preserve their na- 
tionality best, also succumb most easily to transplanta- 
tion, through refusal to adapt their Caucasian clothes 
and habits to Anatolian or Mesopotamlan conditions 
of life. 

All this is Turkey, and we come back to our orig- 
inal question : What common factor accounts for the 
name? What has stained this coat of many colours to 
one political hue? The ansv/er Is simple: Blood. Tur- 
key, the Ottoman state, is not a unity, climatic, geo- 
graphical, racial, or economic; it is a pretension, en- 
forced by bloodshed and violence whenever and wher- 
ever the Osmanll Government has power. 

It is a complex pretension. The first Impulse, and 
the traditional method by which it has been given ef- 
fect, came from a little tribe of pagan, nomadic Turks 
who wandered Into Anatolia from Central Asia In the 
thirteenth century A.D. and were granted camping 
grounds by the reigning Turkish Sultan of the coun- 
try — for Anatolia was already Turkish two centuries 
before the Osmanlls appeared on the scene. But to 
call them Osmanlls is to anticipate the next stage in 
their history. They are named after Osman, their 
first leader's son, and he after the third successor of 
the Prophet — it was a good Moslem name, and he 
took it when he was converted to Islam and organised 
his pagan tent-dwellers into a settled Mohammedan 
State in the north-western hills of Anatolia, on the 



10 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

borders of Christendom. A tribe had become a march, 
and the final stage was from march to empire. 

From this point onwards Ottoman history singu- 
larly resembles the history of the Osmanlis' present 
allies. The March of Brandenburg, the March of 
Austria, and the March of Osman — they were each 
founded as the outer bulwarks of a civilisation, and 
all erected themselves into centres of military ascen- 
dancy over their fellow-countrymen and co-religion- 
Ists to the rear as well as the strangers opposite their 
front. The Osmanlis may have been more savage in 
their methods than the marchmen of Germany — though 
hardly, perhaps, than the Teutonic Knights who pre- 
pared the soil of Prussia for the Hohenzollerns. The 
Teutonic Knights exterminated their victims; the Os- 
manlis drained theirs of their blood by taking a trib- 
ute of their male children, educating them as Mos- 
lems, and training them as recruits for an Ottoman 
standing army. Their first expansion was forwards 
into Christian Europe; their capital shifted from a 
village in the hills to the city of Brusa on the Asiatic 
shore of Marmora, from Brusa across the Dardanelles 
to Adrlanople, from Adrianople to the Imperial city 
on the Bosphorus; and, with the capture of Constan- 
tinople, the Osmanli Sultans usurped the pretensions 
of East Rome, as the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns 
the emblems of Charlemagne and Csesar Augustus. 

Byzantium has become a very potent element in 
the Osmanlis' character, more potent than the habits 
of the march or the instinct of the steppes. It has 
dictated their system of administration, dominated 
their outlook on life, penetrated their blood. But the 
heritage of "Rum" Is not the final factor in the Otto- 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 11 

man Empire as it exists to-day; for after the succes- 
sors of Osman had founded their military monarchy 
with blood and iron on the ruins of one-third of Eu- 
rope, they turned eastwards, with a genuinely Oriental 
gesture, and overran kingdoms and lands with the ap- 
parently mechanical impetus of all Asiatic conquerors, 
from Sargon of Akkad and Cyrus the Persian to Jen- 
ghls Khan and Timur. The stoutest opponent of the 
Osmanlis in Asia was the Anatolian Sultanate of Kara- 
man — Moslem, Turkish, and the legitimate heir of 
those Seljuk Turkish Sultans who had given Osman*s 
father his first footing In the land. Osmanli and Kara- 
manli fought on equal terms, but when Karaman was 
overthrown there was no power left in Asia that could 
stop the Osmanlis' advance. The Egyptians and Per- 
sians had no more chance against Ottoman discipline 
and artillery than the last Darius had against the Mace- 
donians. A campaign or two brought Sultan Selim 
the First from the Taurus to Cairo ; a few more cam- 
paigns at intervals during the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, when Ottoman armies could be spared from 
Europe, drove the Persians successively out of Ar- 
menia and Mosul and Bagdad. And thus, by acci- 
dent, as it were, in the pursuit of more coveted things, 
the Osmanlis acquired "Turkey-in-Asia," which is all 
that remains to them now and all that concerns us 
here. 

"Turkey-in-Asia" is a transitory phenomenon, a 
sort of chrysalis which enshrouded the countries of 
Western Asia because they were exhausted and needed 
torpor as a preliminary to recuperation. Many calami- 
ties had fallen upon them during the five centuries 
before the chrysalis formed. The break-up of the 



1^ TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

Arab Caliphate of Bagdad had led to an interminable, 
meaningless conflict among a host of petty Moslem 
States ; the wearing struggle between Islam and Chris- 
tendom had been intensified by the Crusades; and 
waves of nomadic Invaders, each more destructive and 
more Irresistible than the last, had swept over Moslem 
Asia out of the steppes and deserts of the north-east. 
The most terrible were the Mongols, who sacked Bag- 
dad In 1258, and gave the coup de grace to the civilisa- 
tion of Mesopotamia. And then, when the native pro- 
ductiveness of the Near East was ruined, the transit 
trade between Europe and the Indies, which had be- 
longed to it from the earliest times and had been the 
second source of its prosperity, was taken from It by 
the western seafarers who discoveerd the ocean routes. 
The pall of Ottoman dominion only descended when 
life was extinct. 

The Osmanlis, whose nomadic forefathers had fled 
before the face of the Mongols out of Central Asia, 
took the heritage which had slipped from the Mongols' 
grasp, and gathered all threads of authority In V\^est- 
ern Asia into their hands. The most valuable spoil 
of their Asiatic conquests was the Caliphate. Hulaku, 
the sacker of Bagdad, had put the Caliph Mustasim 
to death, and the remnant of the Abbasids had kept 
up a shadowy succession at Cairo, under the protection 
of the Sultan of Egypt. Selim the Osmanli, when he 
entered Cairo as a conqueror in 1517, caused the 
contemporary Abbasid to cede his title, for what it 
was worth, to him and his successors. It was a doubt- 
ful title, scorned by all Shias and regarded coldly by 
many SunnI rulers who were unwilling to recognise a 
spiritual superior in their most formidable temporal 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE IS 

rival. But such as It was, It strengthened the Osmanli's 
hold on his dominions. Caliph of Islam, victorious 
guardian of the Moslem marches, and heir by conquest 
of imperial Rum, the Osmanll Sultan held his Asiatic 
provinces with ease; but the best security for his 
tenure was the misery to which they were reduced. 
Commerce and cultivation ebbed, population dwindled, 
and nomads still drifted In upon what once had been 
settled lands. The Ottoman Government, desiring 
a barrier against Persia, encouraged the Kurds to 
spread themselves over Armenia; it welcomed less the 
Shammar and Anazeh Arabs, who broke over the Eu- 
phrates about the year 1700 and turned the last fields 
of Northern Mesopotamia to desolation; but It was 
too Impotent or indifferent to turn them out. West- 
ern Asia lay fallow under the Ottoman cannon-wheels. 
There have been fallow periods before In the slow 
rhythm of Its life — under the Persians, for Instance, 
who overran all lands and peoples of the East In the 
sixth century B.C., overshadowed the Greeks for a mo- 
ment, as the Osmanlis overshadowed Europe, halted, 
too massive for offence but seemingly unassailable, and 
then collapsed pitifully before the probing spears of 
Alexander. 

The Osmanlis are passing at this moment as the 
Achaemenids passed then. They lost the last of Eu- 
rope In the Balkan War, and with It their prestige as 
Increasers of Islam; the growth of national conscious- 
ness among their subjects, not least among the Turks 
themselves, has loosened the foundations of their mili- 
tary empire, as of the other military empires with 
which they are allied. They forfeited the Caliphate 
when they proclaimed the Holy War against the Al- 



14 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

lied Powers^ — Inciting Moslems to join one Christian 
coalition against another, not in defence of their re- 
ligion, but for Ottoman political aggrandisement. 
They lost it morally when this incitement was left 
unheeded by the Moslem world; they lost it in deed 
when the Sherif of Mekka asserted his rights as the 
legitimate guardian of the Holy Cities, drove out the 
Ottoman garrison from Mekka, and allied himself 
with the other independent princes of Arabia. All the 
props of Ottoman dominion in Asia have fallen away, 
but nothing dooms it so surely as the breath of life that 
is stirring over the dormant lands and peoples once 
more. The cutting of the Suez Canal has led the 
highways of commerce back to the Nearer East; the 
democracy and nationalism of Europe have been ex- 
tending their influence over Asiatic races. On what- 
ever terms the War is concluded, one far-reaching re- 
sult is certain already: there will be a political and 
economic revival in Western Asia, and the direction 
of this will not be in Ottoman hands. 

We are thus witnessing the foundation of a new 
era as momentous, if not as dramatic, as Alexander's 
passage of the Dardanelles. The Ottoman vesture 
has waxed old, and something can be discerned of 
the new forms that are emerging from beneath it; 
their outstanding features are worth our attention. 



II 

THE new Turkish Nationalism is the immediate 
factor to be reckoned with. It Is very new — 
newer than the Young Turks, and sharply op- 
posed to the original Young Turkish programme — but 
it has established Its ascendancy. It decided Turkey's 
entry Into the War, and is the key to the current pol- 
icy of the Ottoman Government. 

The Young Turks were not Nationalists from the 
beginning; the "Committee of Union and Progress" 
was founded in good faith to liberate and reconcile all 
the inhabitants of the Empire on the principles of 
the French Revolution. At the Committee's congress 
in 1909 the Nationalists were shouted down with the 
cry: "Our goal Is organisation and nothing else." * 
But Young Turkish ideals rapidly narrowed. Lib- 
eralism gave way to Panislamism, Panislamism to Pan- 
turanlanism, and the "Ottoman State Idea" changed 
from "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" to the Turkl- 
fication of non-Turkish nationalities by force. 

"The French Ideal," writes the Nationalist Tekin 
Alp in Thoughts on the Nature and Plan of a 
Greater Turkey , "is in contradiction to the needs and 
conditions of the age." By contrast, "the Turkish 
national movement does not exhibit the failings of the 
earlier movements. It is in every way adapted to 

* "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp. 

15 



16 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

the intellectual standard and feelings of the nation. 
It also keeps pace with the ideas of the age, which 
have for some decades centred round the principle 
of Nationality. In adopting Turkish Nationalism as 
the basis of their national policy, the Turks have 
only abandoned an abnormal state of affairs and 
thereby placed themselves on a level with modern 
nations." * 

The development of Nationalism among the Turks 
was a natural phenomenon. Starting In the West, the 
movement has been spreading for a century through 
Central Europe, Hungary, and the Balkans, till from 
the Turks' former subjects It has passed to the Turks 
themselves. Chance played Its part. Dr. Nazim Bey, 
for instance, the General Secretary of the "Union and 
Progress" Committee, Is said to have been fired by a 
work of M. Leon Cahun's on the early history of the 
Turks and Mongols, lent him by the French Consul- 
General at Salonika, and the movement was, and still 
Is, confined to a small intelligentsia. But that is the 
case with other national movements too, and does not 
hinder them from being powerful forces. Turkish 
Nationalism was kept alive after 1909 by a small 
group of enthusiasts at Salonika — their leader was 
Ziya Bey, who had come up to the Young Turk Con- 
gress from Diarbeklr, and was one of the first converts 
to the new Idea. It gained ground suddenly during, 
the Balkan War. The shock of defeat produced a 
craving for regeneration; the final loss of Europe 
turned the minds of the Osmanlis to the possibilities 
of Asia, and they were struck by the action of several 

* "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp. 



TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 17 

prominent Russian subjects of Turco-Tatar nationality, 
who, out of racial sympathy, had given their services to 
the Ottoman Government in this time of adversity. 
As Tekin Alp expresses it: 

*'The Turks realised that, in order to live, they 
must become essentially Turkish, become a nation, 
be themselves. . . . The Turkish nation turned 
aside its gaze from the lost territory and looked in- 
stead upon Turania, the ideal country of the future." 

Two years later this ''New Orientation" had so 
mastered the Ottoman Government that it drew them 
into the European War. 

There are many aims within the new Turkish hori- 
zon. Some of them are negative and non-political, 
some practical and extremely aggressive. Ziya Bey's 
adherents first took in hand the purification of the 
Turkish language. A Turkish poet had endeavoured 
before to dispense with the 95 per cent. (?) of the 
vocabulary that was borrowed from Persian and Ara- 
bic, and "his poetry had to be published in small pro- 
vincial papers because the important newspapers of 
the towns would not accept it." The established writ- 
ers in the traditional style m.ade a hard fight, but Te- 
kin Alp claims that the Yerd Lis an (New Language) 
"is to-day in possession of an absolute and unlimited 
authority." Borrowed rhythms have been banned as 
well as borrowed words, and there is even an agita- 
tion to replace the Arabic script by a new Turkish 
alphabet — an imitation of the Albanian movement 
which was opposed so fiercely by the Turks themselves 
before the Balkan War. In 19 13 the Government 



18 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

stepped in with the foundation of a "Turkish Acad- 
emy" ( Turk Bilgi Derneyi) , and the Ministr}?- of Edu- 
cation started an "Institute of Terminology," "Con- 
servatoire," and "Writing and Translation Commit- 
tee." The translation of foreign masterpieces as an 
incentive to a new national literature was in the pro- 
gramme of Ziya Bey's society, the Yeni Hay at (New 
Life). Their most cherished plan was to translate 
the Koran and the Friday Sermon, to have the Khutba 
(Prayer for the Caliph) recited in Turkish, and to re- 
move the Arabic texts from the walls of the mosques; '^'' 
the eyes and ears of Turkish Moslems were to be 
saved from the contamination of an anti-national lan- 
guage ; but the campaign against Arabic passed over 
into an attack upon Islam. 

"The Turkish Nationalists," Tekin Alp explains, 
"have made great efforts to nationalise religion it- 
self, and to give it the impress of the Turkish na- 
tional spirit. This idea was zealously supported 
by a fortnightly periodical, and one of the noblest 
tasks undertaken by it has been the translation of 
the Koran into Turkish. This is a reform of the 
greatest importance. It is well known that the trans- 
lation of the Koran has hitherto been considered a 
sin. The Nationalists have cut themselves off from 
this superstitious prejudice and have had three trans- 
lations made, the above-mentioned and two others." 

On this issue the Nationalists broke a lance with 
the Islamjis, or "clericals," as Tekin Alp prefers to call 
them. 

* The Near East, 30th March, 1917, p. 507; see also Tekin Alp. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 19 

"Because it Is written In the Koran that Islam 
knows no nationalities, but only Believers, the 
Islamjis thought that to occupy oneself with na- 
tional questions was to act against the Interests and 
principles of Islam Itself. . . . According to the 
Nationalists, the pronouncement In the Koran was 
directed exclusively against the very frequent dis- 
sensions of clans and parties In the various Arab 
races." (A sneer which Is meant to have a modern 
application.) ''Although the Nationalists proclaim 
themselves the most zealous followers of Mo- 
hammed, nevertheless they do not conceal the fact 
that their Interpretation of Islam Is not the same 
as that of the Arabs. They maintain that the Turks 
cannot Interpret the Koran In the same manner as 
the Arabs. . . . Their Idea of God Is also differ- 
ent." . 

This amazing Kulturkampf Is quite possibly a 
reminiscence of BIsmarcklan Germany, for Turkish 
Nationalism Is saturated with forgotten European 
moods, and Its vein of Romanticism Is as antiquated 
as the Kaiser's. It has taken Attila to Its heart, and 
rehabilitated Jenghls Khan, TImur, Oghuz, and 
the rest with the erudition of a Turanian Walter 
Scott. 

"My Attila, my Jenghls," sings ZIya Gok Alp, 
"these heroic figures, which stand for the proud 
fame of my race, appear on the dry pages of the 
history books as covered with shame and disgrace, 
while In reality they are no less than Alexander 
and Caesar. Still better known to my heart Is Oghuz 



20 TURKEY,: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

Khan.* In me he still lives in all his fame and 
greatness. Oghuz Khan delights and inspires my 
heart and causes me to sing psalms of gladness. 
The fatherland of the Turks is not Turkey or Tur- 
kestan, but the broad eternal land of Turania." 

The Ministry of Evkaf (Religious Endowments) 
recently made a grant of £50,000 (Turkish) towards 
the publication of works on these worthies; the stu- 
dents at the Military College in Constantinople are 
alleged to have been diverted from their studies by 
their devotion to such literature, and on the eve of 
the War the Professor of Military Education there 
is reported to have delivered the following address to 
an instruction class of reserve officers: 

*'We are, gentlemen, before all, Turks. I won- 
der why we are called Ottomans, for who is Osman 
after whom we are named? He is a Turk from 
Altai, who overran this country with his Turkish 
Army. Therefore it is more of an honour to us to 
be named after his origin than after himself. We 
have so far been deceived by the ignorance of our 
forebears, and fie on these forebears who made us 
forget our nationality. ... Be sure that Turkish 
nationality is better for us than Islam, and racial 
pride is one of the greatest social virtues." f 

These extravagances must not be taken too lit- 
erally. The Young Turk politicians, though they have 
embarked on a Nationalist policy, are not so reckless 
as to break openly with Islam or to denounce the 

* The legendary ancestor of the Turkish race, 
t The Near East, loc. cit. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE ^1 

founder of their State. They see clearly enough that 
Turkish Nationalism carried to a logical extreme is 
incompatible with the Ottoman pretension, and they 
favour the view, so severely criticised by Tekin Alp, 
"that all three groups of ideas — Ottomanism, Islam- 
ism, and the Turkish Movement — should work side 
by side and together." But, with this reservation, 
they follow the doctrinaires, who on their part are 
quite ready to press Islam into their service. Tekin 
Alp candidly admits that 

*'They sought after a judicious mingling of the 
religious and national Impulses. They realised only 
too clearly that the still abstract ideals of National- 
ism could not be expected to attract the masses, the 
lower classes, composed of uneducated and ilHter- 
ate people. It was found more expedient to reach 
these classes under the flag of religion." 

This sentence reveals in a flash one motive of the 
Armenian "Deportations," which followed Turkey's 
Intervention In the War; and a celebrated German 
authority, in a memorial* written in 191 6, gives this 
very explanation of their origin. 

"Turkey's entry into the War," he writes, "was 
unwelcome to Turkish society in Constantinople, 
whose sympathies were with France, as well as to 
the 'mass of the people, but the Panislamic prop- 
aganda and the military dictatorship were able to 
stifle all opposition. The proclamation of the 'Holy 

* Which (for obvious reasons) was printed for private circula- 
tion only. 



^^ TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

War' produced a general agitation of the Moham- 
medan against the Christian elements In the Em- 
pire, and the Christian nationalities had soon good 
reason to fear that Turkish chauvinism would make 
use of Mohammedan fanaticism to make the War 
popular with the mass of the Mohammedan popu- 
lation." 

The evidence presented In the British Blue Book 
on the Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Em- 
pire * shows that this explanation is correct. The Ar- 
menians were not massacred spontaneously by the local 
Moslems; the Initiative came entirely from the Cen- 
tral Government at Constantinople, which planned the 
systematic extermination of the Armenian race In the 
Ottoman Empire, worked out a uniform method of 
procedure, despatched simultaneous orders to the pro- 
vincial officials and gendarmerie to carry it Into ef- 
fect, and cashiered the few who declined to obey. The 
Armenians were rounded up and deported by regular 
troops and gendarmes; they were massacred on the 
road by bands of cheitis, consisting chiefly of crim- 
inals released from prison by the Government for this 
work; when the Armenians were gone the Turkish 
populace was encouraged to plunder their goods and 
houses, and as the convoys of exiles passed through 
the villages the best-looking women and children were 
sold cheap or even given away for nothing to the Turk- 
ish peasantry. Naturally the Turkish people accepted 
the good things the Government offered them, and 
naflirally this reconciled them momentarily to the War. 

Thus in the Armenian atrocities the Young Turks 

* Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916). 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 23 

made Panislamism and Turkish Nationalism work to- 
gether for their ends, but the development of their 
policy shows the Islamic element receding and the Na- 
tionalist gaining ground. 

*'After the deposition of Abd-ul-Hamld," writes 
the German authority quoted above, "the Commit- 
tee of Union and Progress reverted more and more 
to the ex-Sultan's policy. To begin with, a rigorous 
party tyranny was set up. A pov/er behind the Gov- 
ernment got the official executive apparatus into its 
hand, and the elections to Parliament ceased to be 
free. The appointment of the highest officials in the 
Empire and of all the most Important servants of 
the administration was settled by decrees of the 
Committee. All bills had to be debated first by 
the Committee and to receive its approval before 
they came before the Chamber. PubHc policy was 
determined by two main considerations : ( i ) The 
centralistic idea, which claimed for the Turkish race 
not merely preponderant but exclusive power In 
the Empire, was to be carried to its logical conse- 
quences; (2) The Empire was to be established 
on a purely Islamic foundation. Turkish National- 
ism and the Panislamic Idea precluded a priori any 
equality of treatment for the various races and re- 
ligions of the Empire, and any movement which 
looked for the salvation of the Empire in the de- 
centralisation or autonomy of its various parts was 
branded as high treason. The nationalistic and cen- 
tralistic tendency was directed not merely against the 
various non-Mohammedan nationalities — Greeks, 
Armenians, Syrians, and Jews — but also against the 



24^ TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

non-Turkish Mohammedan nations— Arabs, Mo- 
hammedan Syrians, Kurds, and the Shla element in 
the population. An idol of Tan-Turklsm' was 
erected, and all non-Turkish elements in the popula- 
tion were subjected to the harshest measures. The 
rigorous action which this policy prescribed against 
the Albanians, who were mostly Mohammedans and 
had been thorough loyalists till then, led to the loss 
of almost the whole of European Turkey. The same 
policy has provoked insurrections in the Arab half 
of the Empire, which a series of campaigns has 
failed to suppress. The conflict with the Arab ele- 
ment continues" — this was written in 191 6 — "though 
the Tloly War' has forced it to a certain extent into 
the background." 

*'The conflict with the Arabs" — that has been the 
worst folly of the Young Turkish politicians, and it 
will perhaps be the most powerful solvent of the Em- 
pire which the Osmanlis have misgoverned so long. 
It is the inevitable consequence of the camarilla gov- 
ernment and the Pan-Turkish chauvinism for which 
the Committee of Union and Progress has come to 
stand. 

The Committee consists by Its statutes of Turks 
alone, and the election even of one Arab was vetoed.* 
Tekin Alp informs us that 

*'The portfolio of the Minister of Trade and 
Agriculture, which has been in the hands of Greeks 
and Armenians since the time of the Constitution, 
and was lately given to a Christian Arab, has at 

* Memorial of the German authority cited above. 



TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 25 

last been handed over to the Constantinople deputy 
Ahmed Naslmi Bey, who joined with Ziya Gok Alp 
in laying the foundations of the Turkish Movement 
immediately after the proclamation of the Consti- 
tution. With one exception the members of the 
Cabinet are all imbued with the same ideas and 
principles." 

The Armenian deportations gave the Committee 
an opportunity of tightening its hold over the pro- 
vincial officials as well. Valis who refused to carry 
out the orders were superseded if they were strong- 
minded enough to persist; but more often they were 
browbeaten by the leaders of the local Young Turk 
organisations, or even by their own subordinates, and 
let things go their way. Ways and means of pack- 
ing the administration with their own henchmen had 
been discussed by the Committee already in their con- 
gress of October, 191 1, and they had defined 
their policy then in the following remarkable reso- 
lutions : * 

"The formation of new parties in the Chamber 
or In the country must be suppressed and the 
emergence of new 'liberal ideas' prevented. Tur- 
key must become a really Mohammedan country, 
and Moslem ideas and Moslem influence must be 
preponderant. Every other religious propaganda 
must be suppressed. The existence of the Empire 
depends on the strength of the Young Turkish Party 
and the suppression of all antagonistic ideas. . . . 

''Sooner or later the complete Ottomanisation 
of all Turkish subjects must be effected; it Is clear, 

* Quoted by the German authority cited above. 



26 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

however, that this can never be attained by persua- 
sion, but that we must resort to armed force. The 
character of the Empire must be Mohammedan, and. 
respect must be secured for Mohammedan Institu- 
tions and traditions. Other nationalities must be 
denied the right of organisation, for decentralisation 
and autonomy are treason to the Turkish Empire. 
The nationalities are a quantite negligeable. They 
can keep their religion hut not their language. The 
propagation of the Turkish language is one of the 
sovereign means of confirming the Mohammedan 
supremacy and assifnilating the other elements'' 

The confusion of aims In these two paragraphs 
reveals the direction in which Young Turkish policy 
has been travelling. Religion is now secondary to 
language, and the precedence still given to the Islam- 
ic formula is only in apparent contradiction to this, 
for Mohammedan supremacy is equated with the Turk- 
ish National Idea. Such a version of Panlslamism 
leaves no room for an Arab race under Ottoman rule, 
and the "Panturanlan" address given by the Turkish 
Professor at the Military College In Constantinople 
had a sequel which showed the Arabs what they, too, 
had to expect from Turkey's entrance into the War. 

There were Arabs among the officers whom the 
Professor was addressing, and one of them ventured 
to protest. 

"All Ottomans are not Turks," he said, "and 
If the Empire were to be considered purely Turkish, 
then all the non-Turkish elements would be foreign 
to itj instead of being living members of the poHti- 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE Tt 

cal body known as the Ottoman Empire, fighting the 
common fight for it and for Islam." 

To this the Professor is reported to have replied: 

"Although you are an Arab, yet you and your 
race are subject to Turkey. Have not the Turks 
colonised your country, and have they not conquered 
it by the sword? The Ottoman State, which you 
plead, is nothing but a social trick, to which you 
resort in order to attain your ends. As to religion, it 
has no connexion with politics. V/e shall soon march 
forward in the name of Turkey and the Turkish 
flag, casting aside religion, as it is only a personal 
and secondary question. You and your nation must 
realise that you are Turks, and that there is no 
such thing as Arab nationality and an Arab father- 
land." 

It Is said that the Arab officers present handed in 
a joint protest to the Minister of War, asking for the 
Professor's dismissal, and that Enver Bey's answer 
was to have them all sent to the front-line trenches. 

Certainly the Turkish Nationalists have not con- 
cealed their attitude towards the Arabs since the War 
began. 

"The Arab lands," writes Djelal Noury Bey in 
a recently-published work, "and above all Irak * and 
Yemen, must become Turkish colonies in which we 
shall spread our own language, so that at the right 
moment we may make it the language of religion. 

* The Vilayets of Basra and Bagdad. 



S8 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

It IS a peculiarly imperious necessity of our exist 
ence for us to Turkise the Arab lands, for the par- 
ticularistic idea of nationality is awaking among the 
younger generation of Arabs, and already threatens 
us with a great catastrophe. Against this we must be 
forearmed." 

And Ahmed Sherif Bey, again, has written as fol- 
lows in the Tanin: 

*'The Arabs speak their own language and are 
as ignorant of Turkish as if their country were not 
a dependency of Turkey. It is the business of the 
Porte to make them forget their own language and 
to impose upon them instead that of the nation which 
rules them. If the Porte loses sight of this duty it 
will be digging its grave with its own hands, for 
if the Arabs do not forget their language, their his- 
tory, and their customs, they will seek to restore 
their ancient empire on the ruins of Ottomanism 
and of Turkish rule in Asia." 

A Turkish pamphleteer wrote that "the Arabs 
have been a misfortune to Turkey," and that "a Turk- 
ish conqueror's war-horse is better than the Prophet 
of any other nation." This pamphlet was distributed in 
the Caucasus at the Ottoman Government's expense 
as Turkish propaganda. 

But the best proof of the Young Turks' intentions 
towards the Arabs is their actual conduct in the Arab 
provinces of their Empire. In the spring of 191 6 an 
Arab who had escaped from Syria published some 
facts in the Egyptian Press which the Turkish cen- 



TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE S9 

sorship had previously managed to conceal.'^ Business 
was ruined, because the Turks had confiscated all gold 
and forced the people to accept depreciated paper; the 
population was starving, and the Turks had prohibited 
the American colony at Beirut from organising relief; 
the national susceptibilities of the Inhabitants were 
outraged In petty ways — the railway tickets, for In- 
stance, were no longer printed In Arabic, but only In 
Turkish and German; and spies were active In de- 
nouncing the least manifestations of disaffection. A 
Turkish court-martial was sitting In the Lebanon, and 
at the time our Informant left Syria It had 240 persons 
under arrest, 180 of them on political charges. These 
prisoners were the leading men of Syria — Christians 
and Moslems without distinction; for In Syria, as In 
Armenia, the Turks put the leaders out of the way 
before they attacked the nation as a whole; most of 
the Syrian bishops had been deported or driven Into 
hiding; by the beginnig of March, 19 16, it was reck- 
oned that 816 Arabs In Syria and 117 In Mesopotamia 
had already been condemned to death with the confisca- 
tion of their property. A Turkish officer, taking our 
informant for a Turk too, remarked to him: "Those 
Arabs wish to get rid of us and are secretly In sym- 
pathy with our enemies, but we mean to get rid of 
them ourselves before they have any chance of trans- 
lating their sympathy into action.'* This caps what a 
Turkish gendarme in Armenia said to a Danish sister 
serving with the German Red Cross: "First we kill 

* See the journal Al-Mokattam of Cairo, 30th March, 31st March, 
ist April, 1916 (English translation in the form of a pamphlet: "Syria 
during March, 1916," printed by Sir Joseph Causton and Sons Ltd., 
1916). 



30 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

the Armenians, then the Greeks, then the Kurds." * 
Every non-Turkish nationality in the Ottoman Em- 
pire is threatened with extermination. 

But the aims of Turkish Nationalists are not lim- 
ited by the Ottoman frontiers. If they are resolved 
to clear their Empire of every non-Turkish element, 
that is only a step towards extending it over every- 
thing Turkish that lies outside. The Turks have 
not only aliens to get rid of, but an irredenta to win. 

"The Ottoman Turks," Tekin Alp reminds his 
readers, "now only represent a tenth of the whole 
Turkish nation. There are now sixty to seventy 
million Turkish subjects of various states in the 
world, who should succeed in giving the nation an 
Important place among the other Powers. Unfor- 
tunately, there Is no connexion between the separate 
groups, which are distributed over great tracts of 
land. Their aspirations and national institutions 
still divide them. . . . Now that the Ottoman Turks 
have awakened from their sleep of centuries they 
do not only think of themselves, but hasten to save 
the other parts of their race who are living in slav- 
ery or Ignorance. ... 

"Turkish irredentism may be directed towards 
material or moral reforms according to circum- 
stances. If the geographical position favours the 
venture, the Turks can free their brothers from for- 
eign rule. In the other case, they can carry it on 
on moral or Intellectual lines. 

"Irredentism, which other nations may regard 
as a luxury — though often a very terrible and costly 

* Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 253. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 31 

one — is a political and social necessity for the 
Turks. ... If all the Turks in the world were 
welded into one huge community, a strong nation 
would be formed, worthy to take an important place 
among the other nations of the world." * 

This may be a dream, but the Young Turks have 
used the political and military resources of the Otto- 
man Empire to make it a reality. At the congress of 
191 1 it was resolved that "immigration from the Cau- 
casus and Turkestan must be promoted, land found for 
the immigrants, and the Christians hindered from ac- 
quiring real estate." Turkey was first to be reinforced 
by the Turks abroad; in the European War she was 
to strike out as their liberator. The day after their 
declaration of war the Young Turkish Government 
issued a proclamation in which the following sentences 
occur : 

"Our participation in the world war represents 
the vindication of our national ideal. The ideal of 
our nation and people leads us towards the destruc- 
tion of our Muscovite enemy, in order to obtain 
thereby a natural frontier to our empire, which 
should Include and unite all branches of our race." 

When war broke out the "Dashnaktzagan" — the 
Armenian parliamentary party in the Ottoman Em- 
pire — were in congress at Erzerum. A deputation of 
Young Turk propagandists f presented themselves, and 
urged the Armenians to join them in raising a general 

* Thoughts on the Nature and Plan of a Greater Turkey. 
fEmir Hechmat, their chief, subsequently went to Hamadan in 
Persia and organised guerilla bands there. 



32 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

insurrection in Caucasia. They sketched their pro- 
posed partition of Russian territory; the Tatars * were 
to have this, the Georgians that, the Armenians this 
other; autonomy for the new provinces under Ottoman 
suzerainty was to be the reward for co-operation. The 
Dasknaktzagan had always worked with the Young 
Turks in internal politics, but they refused to join them 
in this aggressive venture. The Ottoman Armenians, 
they said, would do their duty as Ottoman subjects dur- 
ing the war, but they advised the Government to pre- 
serve peace if that were still possible.-]- But the Turks 
were past reason, and their Army was already on the 
move. The main body crossed the Russian frontier; a 
second force invaded Northern Persia, and penetrated 
as far as Tabriz. Tabriz is the capital of Azerbaijan, 
a province where the majority of the population is 
Turkish by language; and beyond, across the River 
Aras, lies the Russian province of Baku, also contain- 
ing a large Turkish-speaking population and the vital 
oilfields. The Turkish plan of campaign was frustrated 
by the brilliant Russian victory of Sarikamysh. By 
the end of January, 19 15, the Turkish Army was back 
within Its own frontiers, and in this quarter it has 
not again advanced beyond them. But the Young 
Turks' irredentist ambitions have remained in being. 
During their brief occupation of Northern Persia they 
did their best to wipe out the Syriac element in the 
population — the Nestorian Christians of Urmia. 
Their plan was to get rid of all the non-Turkish peo- 
ples which separate the Turks of Anatolia from the 

^ i.e., the Turkish-speaking population in the Russian Caucasus. 

^Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 8o„ 



TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 33 

Turks of Baku and Azerbaijan, and this was the second 
motive of the Armenian deportations, which they put 
in hand a month or two after their military projects 
had failed. 

The Turkish Irredentists propose, in fact, to gain 
their ends by bloodshed and terrorism. Tekin Alp 
(like most Turkish publicists and politicians since 
1908) is a Macedonian,* and is profoundly impressed 
by the methods which the other nationalities there 
employed to the discomfiture of the Turks them- 
selves. 

^'Observers," he writes, "who, like myself, are 
Macedonians, and, like myself, had ample oppor- 
tunity of gaining an intimate knowledge of the ir- 
redentist propaganda of the Bulgars, Greeks, Serbs, 
and Vlachs, are able to judge the significance of 
this striving after a national Ideal, and how sweet 
and inspiring It is to go through the greatest dan- 
gers for such a cause. This is best Illustrated by a 
few living examples" (which he proceeds to 
give). , . , 

Macedonia is soaked In blood. Atrocities were 
committed here the mere thought of which makes 
one's hair stand on end. Nevertheless, the leaders 
of robber bands and members of the terrible Irre- 
dentist organisations were not regarded by the public 
as wild robbers, but as heroes fighting for the unity 
of the nation. 

"Will the Young Turks emulate the self-sacri- 
fice of these men?" 

* And, like other Young Turks, a Jew ("Tekin Alp" being a 
ttQnt de plume). 



34 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

Russia and Persia are the fields marked out for 
such activity: 

"In some places ordinary propaganda Is suffi- 
cient, but In hotly-contested territory recourse is to 
be had to the more violent measures used in Mace- 
donia. The neighbouring land of Persia Is without 
doubt the best of all countries with Turkish popula- 
tion for spreading the new ideas, and it has been 
found that simple propaganda is amply sufficient to 
produce a satisfactory effect on this fruitful soil." 

In Persia, Tekin Alp reckons, one-third of the 
population is of Turkish blood. He passes these Turk- 
ish elements In review, and concludes that "the spirit 
of the administration Is Turkish, and also the lead- 
ing spirit of Persian civilisation, even though these 
be clothed in Persian guise" — for at present the tables 
are turned. "All those Turkish warriors and heroes, 
Shahs and Grand Viziers, thinkers and scholars, have 
lost their Turkish consciousness and have become as- 
similated to the Persians In writing, speech, and litera- 
ture." Even the compact two millions and a half of 
Turkish-speaking Azerbaijanis will write letters only In 
Persian, and will not read a Turkish newspaper. He 
omits the most important fact — that these Turks of 
Persia are Shias like their Persian fellow-countrymen, 
while the "Mohammedan Institutions and traditions" 
for which the Ottoman Turks are pledged by the 
Young Turk Party to "secure respect" are those of the 
Sunni persuasion. But then Turkish Nationalism de- 
pends upon Ignoring religion. Tekin Alp sets out con- 
fidently to give the Turks in Persia "a Turkish soul." 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 35 

His model Is the Rumanian propaganda among the 
Vlachs in Macedonia, and his expectations are great: 

"There is no power in Persia to put down such 
a movement, because it could do no harm to anyone. 
The nationalisation of the Persian Turks would 
even be a great and unexpected help to the Per- 
sian Government. . . . Persia would be situated 
with regard to the Turkish Government as Bavaria 
towards Prussia.'* 

And this is only a stage towards a higher goal : 

"The united Turks should form the centre of 
gravity of the world of Islam. The Arabs of 
Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, the Persians, Af- 
ghans, etc., must enjoy complete independence in 
their own affairs, but outwardly the world of Islam 
must present a perfectly united front." 

The Arabs of North Africa and the Shias of Iran 
can appraise the "Independence" held out to them by 
the "unity" which Turkish Nationalism has been pre- 
senting already to Syria and Irak, the Yemen and 
the Hedjaz. 

But Tekin Alp deals even less tenderly with Rus- 
sia. In explaining the bond of interest between Turk- 
ish Nationalism and Germany he remarks that 

"The Pan-Turkish aspirations cannot come to 
their full development and realisation until the Mus- 
covite monster is crushed, because the very districts 
which are the object of Turkish Irredentism — Si- 



66 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

beria, the Caucasus, the Crimea, Afghanistan, etc. — 
are still directly or indirectly under Russian rule." 

The *'et cetera" proves to be nothing less than the 
province of Kazan: 

"The alluvial plains of the Volga and the Kama, 
In European Russia, are inhabited by four or five 
million Turks. . . . The Northern Turks are not 
indeed superior to the Ottoman Turks, but must 
not therefore be underrated. Their progressive 
economic and social organisation is in every way a 
great help to the national movement. 

"If," he concludes, "the Russian despotism is, as 
we hope, to be destroyed by the brave German, Aus- 
trian, and Turkish Armies, thirty to forty million 
Turks will receive their independence. With the 
ten million Ottoman Turks this will form a nation 
of fifty million, advancing towards a great civilisa- 
tion which may perhaps be compared to that of 
Germany, in that it will have the strength and energy 
to rise ever higher. In some ways it will be even 
superior to the degenerate French and English civili- 
sations." 

This Nationalism, which dominates Turkey's pres- 
ent, has also decided the question of her future. If 
such a movement has taken possession of the Osmanlis, 
the Osmanlis must lose possession of their Empire. 
Turkish Nationalism now directs the Ottoman Govern- 
ment, wields Its pretensions. Is master within its fron- 
tiers; and how does it use its mastery? To make a 
hell of Armenia and Syria, and to plot out new Mace- 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 37 

donias in Persia and the heart of Russia. Thus Turk- 
ish Nationalism shows where the Turk is intolerable 
and must go, but it also shows where he has some right 
to stay. 

There are innocent and constructive elements in it, 
as in all movements of the kind. As in Europe, it 
has forced open the Dead Hand of the Church. Un- 
der its influence the Ministry of Evkaf, which holds 
the enormous religious endowments of Turkey in trust, 
has turned its funds to the founding of a national bank 
and library, and the subsidising of a national architec- 
ture. It has also started elementary schools, like the 
voluntary schools supported by the Christian nationali- 
ties, in aid of the Ministry of Education; and it has 
taken up the reform of the Moslem seminaries {Me- 
dresses) y which have been one of the strongholds of 
Turkish reaction. The welfare of Turkish students is 
a concern of the Nationalist society called Turk Ujaghi 
(the Turkish Family), founded in 19 12, and now pos- 
sessing sixteen branches in various provincial towns of 
Anatolia — only Turks may be members — with affiliated 
societies in the Caucasus and Turkestan. The Turk 
Ujaghi organises lantern lectures, lectures on mediaeval 
AnatoHan art, and even lectures by a Turkish lady on 
Panturanianism and woman's rights — she is said to 
have had Khodjas * in her audience, and, if so, this 
certainly shows an unheard-of openness to new ideas 
on the part of the "Islamji." Another society, the 
Turk Giiji (Turkish Strength), encourages physical 
culture like the Slavonic Sokols, and there are Izdjis, 
or Turkish Boy-Scouts, under Enver Bey's patronage, 
who take "Turanian" scout-names, blazon the White 

* Moslem religieux. 



38 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

Wolf of Turkish paganism on their flags, and cheer, it 
is said, not for the "Caliph" or the "Padishah," but: 
for the "Khakan." 

This jumble of efforts, half-admirable and half- 
absurd, will justify Turkish Nationalism if it brings 
about the regeneration of the Anatolian peasantry. 
The Anatolians have suffered as much from the Otto- 
man dominion as any of the races which have come 
under Its yoke. They have paid for Ottoman Im- 
perialism with their blood and physique ; their villages 
have been ravaged by the syphilis of the garrison towns, 
and the wider the frontiers of the Empire the further 
from their homes the Anatolian soldiers have died- — in 
the Yemen, in Albania, in Irak, on the snow-covered 
Armenian plateau. Two things are necessary for 
Anatolia's salvation — the limitation of the Turkish 
State to the lands inhabited by its Turkish-speaking 
population, and the replacement of the mongrel Os- 
manli bureaucracy by a cleaner and more democratic 
political order. If the Allies can compass this, they 
may claim without hypocrisy to have liberated another 
nationality; for Anatolia will be reborn on the day of 
its escape from the Ottoman chrysalis as truly as were 
Serbia and Greece and Rumania and Bulgaria. 

The beginnings will be difficult, as they have been 
in the Balkans. Whatever frontiers a Turkish Na- 
tional State may receive, they cannot be drawn without 
including non-Turkish elements — racial geography is 
nowhere very simple between Bagdad and Vienna — 
and in view of what the Turk's racial minorities have 
suffered during the War and before it, those left to 
him hereafter must be safeguarded by stringent guar- 
antees — far more stringent than the Capitulations, 



TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 39 

which, for that matter, protected none but the na- 
tionals of foreign Powers. The Capitulations are a 
problem in themselves. They were repudiated by the 
Young Turkish Government at the beginning of the 
War, as well as the conventions regulating the customs 
tariff. It is difficult to see how the Peace Conference 
can pass over flagrant violations of international trea- 
ties, and the Nationalists' contention that Turkish jus- 
tice has been brought up to a European standard will 
not bear examination; on the contrary, the Young 
Turkish congress of 191 1 passed a resolution that "the 
reorganisation of the administration of justice was less 
important than the abolition of the Capitulations." 
These difficulties, however, might be settled with a 
new and better Anatolian government; and as for the 
racial question, with time and guaranteed tolerance for 
rehglon it might solve itself, for there is a rude vitality 
In the Turkish language, and the Greek and Armenian 
minorities in Central Anatolia have been gradually 
adopting it in place of their native speech, though this 
tendency is now being counteracted by the spread of 
national schools among the scattered outposts of the 
two nationalities in the interior. 



Ill 

WITH these suggestions, Anatolia and Turkish 
Nationalism may be dismissed from our sur- 
vey. Shorn of their pretensions in Armenia 
and the countries south of Taurus, the Turks may ex- 
periment in the art of government without the tragedies 
which their present domination has brought upon 
mankind. The other lands and peoples of Western 
Asia, when they have ceased to be "Turkey," will be 
restored once more to the civilised world. What forces 
will shape their growth? Not, even indirectly, the 
discrowned Turk, for if he were not banned by his 
crimes he would still be doomed by his incapacity. 

The relative qualities of the different Near East- 
ern races are not in doubt. A German teacher in 
the German Technical School at Aleppo, who resigned 
his appointment as a protest against the Armenian 
atrocities in 19 15, thus records his personal judgment 
in an open letter to the Reichstag: * 

"The Young Turk is afraid of the Christian na- 
tionalities — Armenians, Syrians and Greeks — on ac- 
count of their cultural and economic superiority, and 
he sees in their religion a hindrance to Turkifying 

* Ein Wort an die Berufenen Vertreter des Deutschen Volkes: 
Eindriicke eines deutschen Oberlehrers aus der TUrkei, von Dr. 
Martin Niepage, Oberlehrer an der deutschen Realschule zu Aleppo, 
z.Zt. Wernigerode." (Printed in the second pamphlet issued by the 
Swiss Committee for Armenian Relief at Basel; English translation, 
"The Horrors of Aleppo." London, 1917: Hodder and Stoughton.) 

40 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 41 

them by peaceful means. They must therefore be 
exterminated or converted to Islam by force. The 
Turks do not suspect that in so doing they are saw- 
ing off the branch on which they are sitting them- 
selves. Yet who is to help Turkey forward if not 
the Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians, who constitute 
more than a quarter of the population of the Em- 
pire ? The Turks, the least gifted of the races liv- 
ing in Turkey f are themselves only a minority of the 
population, and are still far behind the Arabs in 
culture. Where is there any Turkish trade, Turkish 
handicraft, Turkish industry, Turkish art, Turkish 
science? They have even borrowed their law and 
religion from the conquered Arabs, and their lan- 
guage, so far as it has been given literary form. 

"We teachers, who have been teaching Greeks, 
Armenians, Arabs, Turks, and Jews in German 
schools in Turkey for years, can only pass judgment 
that of all our pupils the pure Turks are the most 
unwilling and the least talented. When for once 
in a way a Turk does achieve something, one can be 
sure in nine cases out of ten that one is dealing 
with a Circassian, an Albanian, or a Turk with Bul- 
garian blood in his veins. From my personal ex- 
perience I can only prophesy that the Turks proper 
will never achieve anything in trade, industry, or 
science. 

"We are told now in the German Press about 
the Turks' hunger for education, and of how they 
are thronging eagerly to learn German. There is 
even a report of language courses for adults which 
have been started in Turkey. They have certainly 
been started, but with what result? One reads of 



42 TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 

the language course at a technical school which be- 
gan with twelve Turkish teachers as pupils. Our 
informant forgets to add, however, that after four 
lessons only six pupils presented themselves; after 
five, five; after six, four; and after seven only three, 
so that after eight lessons the course broke down, 
through the indolence of the pupils, before it had 
properly commenced. If the pupils had been Arme- 
nians they would have persevered till the end of the 
school year, learnt industriously, and finished with a 
respectable mastery of the German language." 

From a German teacher who has worked in Tur- 
key for three years this verdict is crushing, and Tekin 
Alp himself virtually admits the charge. ''It is true," 
he writes, ''that the Turkish character is usually lack- 
ing in the qualities most essential to trade or economic 
undertakings, but these may be acquired by a reason- 
able and methodical training and organisation." The 
only "organisation" that seems to occur to him is the 
Boycott, which has been popular with the Turks since 
the Revolution of 1908. 

*'The unaccommodating attitude of the Greek 
Government was sufficient excuse," he remarks, in 
reference to the Boycott of 19 12. "The real motive, 
however, was the longing of the Turkish nation for 
independence in their own country. The Boycott, 
which was at first directed solely against the Greeks, 
was then extended to the Armenians and other non- 
Mohammedan circles, and was carried out with 
undiminished energy. This movement, which lasted 
in all its rigour for several months, caused the ruin 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 43 

of hundreds of small Greek and Armenian trades- 
men. . . . The S3'*^tematlc and rigorous Boycott is 
now at an end, but the spirit it created in the people 
still persists. ... It can now be asserted that the 
movement for restoring the economic life of Turkey 
is on the right road." 

The real effects of the Boycott of 191 2 are de- 
scribed by the German authority whose memorial has 
several times been cited in this article. He tells us 
how, under the patronage of the Young Turkish Gov- 
ernment, associations were formed which intimidated 
the Moslem peasants into buying from them, when 
they came to market. Instead of from the Christians 
with whom they had formerly dealt. 

"The peasants came to their old dealers," the 
memorial continues, "lamented their fate, and asked 
their advice as to how they could save themselves 
from the hands of their fellow-countrymen. They 
were dehghted when at last the Boycott came to 
an end and they could once more buy from Greeks 
and Armenians, where they were well served and 
got good value for their money." 

If the Turkish Nationalists had confined them- 
selves to economic weapons, the Turks' economic in- 
eptitude would have prevented them from doing serious 
harm; but by abusing the political and military powers 
of the Ottoman State to perpetrate the recent atroci- 
ties they have struck a mortal blow at the prosperity 
of Western Asia. 



U TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 

"In the whole of Asia Minor, with perhaps one 
or two exceptions," the same German authority- 
states, ''there is not a single pure Turkish firm en- 
gaged in foreign trade. . . . The extermination of 
the Armenian population means not only the loss 
of from lo to 25 per cent, of the total population 
of Anatolia,* but, what is most serious, the elimina- 
tion of those elements in the population which are 
the most highly developed economically and have the 
greatest capacity for civilisation. . . ." 

And this Is the universal judgment of those In a 
position to know. 

*'The result of the deportations," the American 
Consul at Aleppo declares in an official report,f 
''is that, as 90 per cent, of the commerce of the In- 
terior is in the hands of the Armenians, the country 
is facing ruin. The great bulk of business being 
done on credit, hundreds of prominent business men 
other than Armenians are facing bankruptcy. There 
will not be left in the places evacuated a single tan- 
ner, moulder, blacksmith, tailor, carpenter, clay- 
worker, weaver, shoemaker, jeweller, pharmacist, 
doctor, lawyer, or any of the professional people 
or tradesmen, with very few exceptions, and the 
country will be left in a practically helpless state." 

The German memorialist presses the indictment: 

"You cannot become a merchant by murdering 
one. You cannot master a handicraft If you smash Its 
tools. A sparsely-populated country does not be- 
come more productive If It destroys Its most Indus- 

* The writer includes Armenia under this term. 

t Dated 3rd Aug., 1915: See Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 548. 



TURRET: A PAST AND A FUTURE 45 

trious population. You do not advance the progress 
of civilisation if you drive into the desert, as the 
scapegoat for decades and centuries of wasted op- 
portunities, the element in your population which 
shows the greatest economic ability, the greatest 
progressiveness In education, and the greatest energy 
In every respect, and which was fitted by nature to 
build the bridge between East and West. You only 
corrupt your own sense of right If you tread the 
rights of others under foot. The popularity of an 
unpopular war may temporarily be promoted among 
the Turkish masses by the destruction and spoliation 
of the non-Mohammedan elements — the Armenians 
most of all, but also. In part, the Syrians, Greeks, 
Maronites, and Jews— but thoughtful Mohamme- 
dans, when they realise the whole damage which 
the Empire has sustained, will lament the economic 
ruin of Turkey most bitterly, and will come to the 
conclusion that the Turkish Government has lost 
infinitely more than It can ever win" — It is a Ger- 
man writing — "by victories at the front." 

*We may call It political necessity or what not," 
declared an American travelling In Anatolia during 
the deportations of 19 15, "but In essence it Is a nomi- 
nally ruling class, jealous of a more progressive 
race, striving by methods of primitive savagery to 
maintain the leading place." * 

What forces will be released In Western Asia when 
the Turk has met his fate? Who will repair the ruin 
he leaves behind? 

* Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 413. 



46 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

The Germans? They have been penetrating Tur- 
key economically for the last thirty years. They have 
organised regular steamship services between German 
and Turkish ports, multiplied the volume of Turco- 
German trade, and extended their capital Investments, 
particularly In the Ottoman Debt and the construction 
of railways. In 1881, when the Debt was first placed 
under International administration, Germany held only 

47 per cent, of It, and was the sixth In Importance 
of Turkey's creditors; by 19 12 she held 20 per cent, 
and was second only to France.* Her railway enter- 
prises, more ambitious than those of any other foreign 
Power, have brought valuable concessions in their 
train — harbour works at Haidar Pasha and Alexan- 
dretta. Irrigation works In the Konia oasis and the 
Adana plain, and the prospect, when the Bagdad Rail- 
way reaches the Tigris, of tapping the naphtha de- 
posits of Kerkuk.f Dr. Rohrbach, the German special- 
ist on the Near East, forecasts the profits of the Bag- 
dad Railway from the results of Russian railway-build- 
ing in Central Asia. He prophesies the cultivation of 
cotton, in the regions opened up by the line, on a scale 
which will cover an appreciable part of the demands 
of German industry, and will open a corresponding 
market for German wares among the new cotton-grow- 
ing population.! "Yet the decisive factor In the Bag- 
dad Railway," he counsels his German readers, "is not 
to be found in these economic considerations but In an- 
other sphere." 

* "Die deutsch-turkeschen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen," by Dr. Kurt 
Wiedenfeld, Professor of the Political Sciences at the University of 
Halle. (Duncker and Humblot, 1915). 

t"Die Bagdadbahn," by Dr. Paul Rohrbach (Berlin, 191 1), pp. 

43, 44. 

:|:"Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 49, 50. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 47 

Dr. WIedenfeld drives this home. 

"Germany's relation to Turkey," his monograph 
begins, "belies the doctrine that all modern under- 
standings and differences between nations have an 
economic origin. We are certainly interested in the 
economic advancement of Turkey . . . but in 
setting ourselves to make Turkey strong we have 
been influenced far more by our political interests 
as a State among States (das politische, das staat- 
lich-machtliche Interesse) . Even our economic ac- 
tivity has primarily served this aim, and has in fact 
originated to a large extent in the purely politico- 
military problems {aus den unmittelbaren Machtauf- 
gaben) which confronted the Turkish Government. 
Exclusively economic considerations play a very sub- 
ordinate part in Turco-German relations. 
Our common political aims, and Germany's interest 
in keeping open the land-route to the Indian Ocean, 
will make it more than ever imperative for us to 
strengthen Turkey economically with all our might, 
and to put her in a position to build up, on independ- 
ent economic foundations, a body politic strong 
enough to withstand all external assaults. The 
means will still be economic; the goal will be of a 
poHtical order." * 

And Dr. Rohrbach formulates the political goal 
with starthng precision. After twelve pages of dis- 
quisition on recent international diplomacy he brings 
his thesis to this point: the Bagdad Railway links 
up with the railways of Syria, and 

*The author rubs in his point in his concluding section: "All 
economic measures we may take in Turkey are only a means to an 
end, not an end in themselves" (p. 77). 



48 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

*'The importance of the Syrian railway system 
lies In this, that, if the need arose, It would be the 
direct Instrument for the exercise of pressure upon 
England .... supposing that German-Austro- 
Turkish co-operation became necessary in the direc- 
tion of Egypt." 

Written as It was In 191 1, this is a remarkable 
anticipation of Turkish strategic railway-building since 
the outbreak of war; but it Is infinitely remote in 
purpose from the economic regeneration of Western 
Asia, and even when the German publicists reckon 
in economic values they generally betray their political 
design. 

"The special point for Germany,'* Dr. Wieden- 
feld lays down, in discussing the agricultural pos- 
sibilities of the Ottoman territories, "Is that to a 
large extent crops can be grown here which sup- 
plement our own economic resources In Important 
respects. ... In peace time, of course, no one 
would think of transporting goods of such bulk as 
agricultural products any way but by sea; but the 
War has Impressed on us with brutal clearness the 
value for us of being able on occasions of extreme 
necessity to import cotton from Turkey by land." 

Thus Germany's economic activity In Turkey has 
been not for prosperity but for power, not for peace 
but for war. In developing Turkey, Germany Is 
simply developing the "Central Europe" scheme of 
a military combine self-contained economically and 
challenging the world In arms.* Germany is con- 

* Wiedenfeld's monograph is a sonderabdruch from the two vol- 
umes of studies on the "Wirtschaftliche Annaherung zwischen dr,.:^ 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE m 

cerned with Turkey, not for her splendid past and 
future, but for her miserable present; for Turkey — 
as she is, and only as she is — Is a vital chequer on 
the chess-board where Germany has been playing her 
game of world power, or "des staatllch-machtllchen 
Interessens,'* as Dr. Wledenfeld would say. There- 
fore Germany does not eye the lands and peoples un- 
der Ottoman dominion with a view to their common 
advantage and her own. She selects a ''piece" among 
them which she can keep under her thumb and so 
control the square. Abd-ul-Hamld was her first pawn, 
and when the Young Turk Party swept him off the 
board she adopted them and their colour;* for by 
hook or by crook, through this agency or that, Turkey 
had to be commanded or Germany's play was spoilt. 
Germany's control over Turkey depends upon the 
maintenance of a corrupt minority in power — too weak 
and corrupt to remain In it without Germany's guar- 
antee, and corrupt enough, when secured in it, to put 
it at Germany's disposal. A free hand at home In 
return for servitude in diplomacy and war — the deal 
is called ''Hegemony," and Is as old as Ancient 
Greece. By her hegemony over the Ottoman Gov- 
ernment Germany threatens the British and Rus- 
sian Empires from all the Ottoman frontiers; and 
with the free hand that is their price the Young Turks 
Inflict on all lands and peoples within those frcrstfev. 
whatever evils conduce to the maintenance of their 
pretensions. 

deutschen Reich u. seioen Verbundeten," edited by Heinrich Herkner 
and published by the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, which preaches Nau- 
mann's creed. 

*Just as, by a more gradual process, the Magyar Oligarchy, 
rather than the Hapsburg Dynasty, has become the instrument of 
German control over Austria-Hungary. 



50 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

As Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld point out, this polit- 
ical understanding underlies all Germany's economic 
efforts in Western Asia, and we can see how it has 
warped them from their proper ends. The track 
of the Bagdad Railway, for example, has not been 
selected in the economic interests of the lands and 
peoples which it ostensibly serves. Dr. Rohrbach 
himself admits that 

*'The Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway 
cannot be described as properly paying its way. 
It is otherwise with the" (French) "line from 
Smyrna to Afiun Kara Hissar, which links the Ana- 
tolian Railway with the older railway system in 
the West. . . . The parts of Asia Minor 
which were thickly populated and prosperous in 
antiquity lie mostly westward of this first section 
of the Bagdad Railway, round the river-valleys 
and" (French and English) "railways leading down 
to the iEgean." 

"There are other once-flourishing parts of the 
peninsula," he continues, "which the Bagdad Rail- 
way does not touch at all" — the Vilayet of Sivas 
and the other Armenian provinces. The original Ger- 
man plan was to carry the Railway through Ar- 
menia from Angora to Kharput, but Russia not un- 
naturally vetoed the construction, so near her Cauca- 
sian frontiers, of a line which, by the nature of the 
Turco-German understanding, must primarily serve 
strategic ends,* and the track was therefore deflected 
to the south-east. This took it through the most bar- 

*"Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 29, 33. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 51 

ren parts of Central Anatolia, and In the next sec- 
tion involved the slow and costly work of tunnelling 
the Taurus and Amanus mountains. 

*'If merely economic and not political advan- 
tages were taken into account," Dr. Rohrbach con- 
cedes, "the question might perhaps be raised wheth- 
er it would not be better to leave the Anatolian 
section alone altogether and begin the Bagdad 
Railway from Seleucia" (on the Syrian coast). 
"The future export trade in grain, wool, and cot- 
ton will in any case do all it can to lengthen the 
cheap sea-passage and shorten correspondingly the 
section on which it must pay railway freights. The 
fact that the route connecting Bagdad with the 
Mediterranean coast in the neighbourhood of An- 
tioch is the oldest, greatest, and still most promising 
trade-route of Western Asia is independent of all 
railway projects." 

It is worth remembering that a railway, following 
this route from the Syrian coast to the Persian Gulf, 
has more than once been projected by the British 
Government. As early as the thirties of last century 
Colonel Chesney was sent out to examine the ground, 
and in 1867 the proposal was considered by a Com- 
mittee of the House of Commons. For the economic 
development of Western Asia It Is clearly a better 
plan, but then Dr. Rohrbach bases the "necessity for 
the East Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway" 
on wholly different grounds. 

"The necessity," he declares, "consists in Tur- 
key's military interests, which obviously would be 



5^ TUilKEY: A PAST AND A FUTUHE 

very poorly served"- (by German railway enter- 
prise) "if troops could not be transported by train 
without a break from Bagdad and Mosul to the 
extremity of Anatolia, and vice versa!^ 

The Bagdad Railway is thus acknowledged to be 
an instrument of strategy for the Germans and for 
the Turks of domination — for ^^vice versd'^ means 
that Turkish troops can be transported at a moment's 
notice through the tunnels from Anatolia to enforce 
the Ottoman pretension over the Arab lands. Mili- 
tarily, these tunnels are the most valuable section of 
the line; economically, they are the most costly and 
unremunerative. And the second (and longer) tun- 
nel could still have been dispensed with, if, south 
of Taurus, the track had been led along the Syrian 
coast. "Economic interests and considerations of ex- 
pense," Wiedenfeld concedes,* "argued strongly for 
the latter course, but— fortunately, as we must admit 
to-day — the military point of view prevailed." Thus 
the Turco-German understanding prevented the Bag- 
dad Railway first from beginning at a port on the 
Mediterranean coast, and then from touching the 
coast at all.t "The spine of Turkey," as German 
writers are fond of calling it, distorts the natural 
articulation of Western Asia. 

Nemesis has overtaken the Germans in the Arme- 
nian deportations — a "political end" of Turkish Na- 
tionalism which swept away the "economic means" to- 
wards Germany's subtler policy. A month or two 

* Page 23. 

t Except by a branch line from Adana to Alexandretta, Rohrbach 
(pp. 27, 36, 37) laments the economic drawbacks of this strategic 
necessity. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 53 

before the outbreak of war Dr. Rohrbach stated, in 
a public lecture, that 

"Germany has an important interest in effecting 
and maintaining contact with the Armenian nation. 
We have set before ourselves the necessary and 
legitimate aim of spreading and enrooting German 
influence in Turkey, not only by military missions 
and the construction of railways, but also by the 
establishment of intellectual relations, by the work 
of German Kultur — in a word, by moral conquests ; 
and we are determined, by pacific means, to reach 
an amicable understanding with the Turks and the 
other nations in the Turkish Empire. Our ulterior 
object In this is to strengthen the Turkish Empire 
Internally with the aid of German science, educa- 
tion, and training, and for this work the Armenians 
are Indispensable.'* 

A few months later Germany, as part price of Tur- 
key's intervention in the War, had to leave the Young 
Turks a "free hand" to exterminate the nation which 
was the Indispensable instrument of her Turkish pol- 
icy. On the 9th August, 19 15, the German Am- 
bassador at Constantinople handed in a formal pro- 
test against the deportations, in which his Govern- 
ment "declined all responsibility for the consequences 
which might result." On the nth January, 1916, In 
the German Reichstag, the Chief of the Political De- 
partment of the Foreign Office replied to a question 
from Dr. Liebknecht that "an exchange of views 
about the reaction of these measures upon the popu- 
lation was taking place," and that "further Informa- 



54 TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 

tlon could not be given." And while Germany was 
maintaining this ''correct attitude" before the world, 
she was assisting In Turkey at the destruction of her 
own work. 

Even the atrocities of 1909 had damaged the eco- 
nomic prospects of the Adana district from which Dr. 
Rohrbach * hoped so much, for 

"The first thing the Turkish peasants did was 
to destroy all the steam-ploughs and nearly all 
the threshing machines (there were over a hundred 
of them) which the Armenian villagers had Im- 
ported for the cultivation of the Ciliclan plain." f 

By the atrocities of 191 5 the economic life of 
Western Asia was completely ruined, and the fruits 
of German enterprise were swept away in the flood. 

"I have before me," writes our German memo- 
rialist, "a list of the customers of a single Constan- 
tinople firm of Importers which places Its orders 
principally In Germany and Austria. The accounts 
which this firm has outstanding amount to date to 
£13,922 (Turkish), owing from 378 customers In 
42 towns of the Interior. In consequence of the 
Armenian deportations these debts are no longer 
recoverable. The 378 customers, with all their em- 
ployees, goods, and assets, have vanished from the 
face of the earth. Any of the owners that are still 
alive are now beggars on the borders of the Arabian 
desert." 

* "Bagdadbahn," p. 60. 

t The Gennan memorialist. 



TURKE,Y: A PAST AND A FUTURE 55 

At Urfa, after the atrocities of 1896, philanthro- 
pists of all nations had founded orphanages and 
started native industries. Attached to the German 
orphanage there was a carpet factory, with dyeing 
vats and a spinnery, which Dr. Rohrbach,* after 
personal investigation, describes as "an institution to 
be welcomed as unreservedly from the national as- 
from the humanitarian point of view." 

"The factory," he remarks, "not only provides 
work and bread for 400 persons, but has trans- 
planted one of the most profitable and promising 
industries of the East into the sphere traversed by 
the German Railway, where. German interests are 
predominant." 

He prophesies that the whole carpet industry of 
Western Asia, "from which English and other for- 
eign firms in Smyrna now draw such enormous 
profits," will soon be concentrated round Urfa in Ger- 
man hands. From Armenia's evil, apparently, springs 
Germany's good — but in 191 1 Dr. Rohrbach did not 
foresee the catastrophe of 191 5. 

"For the rise of the carpet industry," our Ger- 
man memoriahst writes, "Turkey has to thank capi- 
talists and exporters who are almost all Arme- 
nians, Greeks, Jews, or Europeans. Like the cot- 
ton cultivation introduced by Germany into Cilicia, 
this carpet industry, in the eastern provinces, has 
been deprived of the hands essential to it by the 
Armenian deportations." 

* "Bagdadbahn," pp. 39, 40. 



56 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

Eye-witnesses at Urfa describe how the Armenian 
community there was massacred in 19 15 — the third 
time in twenty years, and this time to extinction — - 
and it points the irony of the situation that the Turk- 
ish guns were served by German artillerymen.* 

"I have nothing to say," writes Dr. Niepage, 
the German teacher from Aleppo, "about the opin- 
ion of the German officers in Turkey. I often no- 
ticed among them an ominous silence or a convul: 
sive effort to change the subject, when any German 
of warm feelings and independent judgment talked 
in their presence of the fearful sufferings of the 
Armenians." 

This moral bankruptcy is more fatal to the future 
of Germany in Western Asia than all the material 
havoc which the Armenian deportations have caused. 
For Dr. Niepage is convinced that the blood of the 
Armenians will be on Germany's head: 

" 'The teaching of the Germans,' is the simple 
Turk's explanation, . . . and more sensitive Mo- 
hammedans, Turks and Arabs alike, cannot believe 
that their own Government has ordered these hor- 
rors. They lay all excesses at the Germans' door, 
for the Germans, during the War, are regarded as 
Turkey's schoolmasters in everything. The mol- 
lahs declare in the mosques that the German offi- 
cers, and not the Sublime Porte, have ordered the 

* Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 530. Major Count Wolf von 
Wolfskahl, who served as adjutant to Fakhri Pasha in the Turkish 
"punitive expedition" against Urfa, is mentioned as particularly guilty 
by a trustworthy neutral resident in Syria, 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 57 

maltreatment and extermination of the Arme- 
nians. . . . Others say: 'Perhaps the Ger- 
man Government has Its hands tied by certain agree- 
ments defining Its powers, or perhaps it is not an 
opportune moment for intervention.' 

"Our presence had no ameHorating effect, and 
what we could do ourselves was negligible. . . . 
The abusive epithet 'Giaur' Is heard once more by 
German ears. 

*'We think It our duty to draw attention to the 
fact that our educational work in Turkey forfeits 
its moral basis and the natives' esteem, If the Ger- 
man Government is not in a position to prevent the 
brutalities inflicted here upon the wives and chil- 
dren of murdered Armenians. 

"The writer considers It out of the question 
that the German Government, if It seriously desired 
to stem the tide of destruction in this eleventh hour, 
would find it impossible to bring the Turkish Gov- 
ernment to reason. 

"If we persist In treating the massacres of 
Christians as an internal affair of Turkey, which is 
only important to us because it ensures us the 
Turks' friendship, then we must change the orien- 
tation of our German Kidturpolitik. We must stop 
sending German teachers to Turkey, and we teach- 
ers must give up telling our pupils in Turkey about 
German poets and philosophers, German culture 
and German ideals, to say nothing of German 
Christianity. 

"Three years ago I was sent by the Foreign 
Office as higher-grade teacher to the German Tech- 
nical School at Aleppo. The Prussian Provincial 



58 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

School Board at Magdeburg specially enjoined upon 
me, v/hen I went out, to show myself worthy of the 
confidence reposed in me in the grant of furlough 
to take up this post. I should not be fulfilling my 
duty as a German official and an accredited repre- 
sentative of German culture, if I consented to keep 
silence in face of the atrocities of which I was a 
witness, or to look on passively while the pupils 
entrusted to my charge were driven out into the 
desert to die of starvation. 

"The things of which everybody here has been 
a witness for months past remain as a stain on 
Germany's shield in the minds of Oriental na- 
tions." 

What will be left to Germany In Western Asia 
after the war? She may keep her trade, though 
Wiedenfeld confesses that "the exchange of com- 
modities between Germany and Turkey has never 
attained any really considerable dimensions," and 
that "the German export trade commands no really 
staple article whatever of the kind exported by Eng- 
land, Austria, and Russia" — unless we count as such 
munitions and other materials of war.* Except for 
the last Item, this German trade will probably remain 
and grow; but the German hegemony, based on rail- 
way enterprise and reinsured by "moral conquests," 
will scarcely survive the Ottoman dominion. 

Happily there are other representatives of culture, 
other indigenous nationalities, other possibilities of 
economic development, which will remain in Western 
Asia when the Turk and German have gone, and 

* On which Wiedenfeld lays stress, pp. 19, 23. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 59 

which may be equal to repairing the ruin they will 
leave behind. 

For nearly a century now the American Evan- 
gelical Missions have been doing work there which 
is the' greatest conceivable contrast to the German 
Kiilturpolitik of the last thirty years. A missionary, 
sent out to relieve the first pioneers, was given the 
following instructions by the American Board: 

"The object of our missions to the Oriental 
Churches is, first, to revive the knowledge and 
spirit of the Gospel among them, and, secondly, by 
this means to operate upon the Mohammedans. 

The Oriental Churches need assistance 
from their brethren abroad. Our object is not to 
subvert them: you are not sent among those 
Churches to proselytise. Let the Armenian remain 
an Armenian if he will, the Greek a Greek, the 
Nestorian a Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental. 

Your great business is with the funda- 
mental doctrines and duties of the Gospel."* 

In this spirit the American missionaries have 
worked. They have had no warships behind them, 
no diplomatic support, no political ambitions, no eco- 
nomic concessions. As Evangelicals their first step 
was to translate the Bible into all the living languages 
and current scripts of the Nearer East. For the 
Bulgars and Armenians this was the beginning of 
their modern literature, but the jealousy of the Or- 
thodox and Gregorian clergy was naturally aroused. 

* "Leavening the Levant," by Rev. J. Greene, D.D. (Boston, 1916: 
The Pilgrim Press), p. 99. 



60 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

Native Protestant Churches formed themselves — not 
by the missionaries' Initiative but on their own. They 
were trained by the missionaries to self-government, 
and as they spread from centre to centre they grouped 
themselves In unions, with annual meetings to settle 
their common affairs. The missionaries also encour- 
aged them to be self-supporting, and in 1908 the con- 
tributions of the Native Churches to the general ex- 
penses of the missions were twice as large as those of 
the American Board.* The Ottoman Government 
recognised Its Protestant subjects as a religious corpo- 
ration (Millet) in 1853, and In spite of this the 
jealousy of the national Churches was overcome. For 
the work of the Americans was not confined to the 
new Protestant community. The translation of the 
Bible led them also into educational work; they laid 
the foundations of secondary education in Western 
Asia, and their schools and colleges — still the only in- 
stitutions of their kind— are attended by Gregorians 
as well as Protestants, Moslems as well as Christians, 
Moslem girls as well as boys. As they opened up re- 
moter districts they added medicine to their activities, 
and their hospitals, like their schools, have been the 
first In the field. And all this has been built up so 
unassumingly that Its magnitude Is hardly realised by 
the Americans themselves. In the three Turkey Mis- 
sions, which cover Anatolia and Armenia — the whole 
of Turkey except the Arab lands — there were, on the 
eve of the War, 209 American missionaries with 1,299 
native helpers, 163 Protestant churches with 15,348 
members, 450 schools with 25,922 pupils; Constan- 

* Excluding, of course, the hospital and educational endowments, 
and the salaries of the missionaries themselves. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 61 

tinople College and 6 other colleges or high schools 
for girls; Robert College on the Bosphorus and 9 
other colleges for men or boys; and 11 hospitals. 

The War, when it came, seemed to sweep away 
everything. The Protestant Armenians, in spite of 
a nominal exemption, were deported arid massacred 
like their Gregorian fellow-countrymen; the boys and 
girls were carried away from the American colleges, 
the nurses and patients from the hospitals; the empty 
buildings were ''requisitioned" by the Ottoman au- 
thorities; the missionaries themselves, in their devoted 
efforts to save a remnant from destruction, suffered 
as many casualties from typhus and physical exhaus- 
tion as any proportionate body of workers on the 
European battlefields. The Turkish Nationalists con- 
gratulated themselves that the American work in 
Western Asia was destroyed. In praising a lecture 
by a member of the German Reichstag, who had de- 
clared himself "opposed to all missionary activities in 
the Turkish Empire," a Constantinople newspaper* 
wrote : 

"The suppression of the schools founded and 
directed by ecclesiastical missions or by individuals 
belonging to enemy nations is as important a meas- 
ure as the abolition of the Capitulations. Thanks 
to their schools, foreigners were able to exercise 
great moral influence over the young men of the 
country, and they were virtually in charge of its 
spiritual and intellectual guidance. By closing them 
the Government has put an end to a situation as 
humiliating as it was dangerous." 

* Hilal, 4th April, 1916, quoted in Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), 
pp. 654-6. 



6^ TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

But the missionaries' spirit was something they 
could not destroy. 

*'When they deported the Armenians,'* wrote a 
missionary, "and left us without work and without 
friends, we decided to come home and get our 
vacation and be ready to go wherever we could 
after the War." * 

After the War the Turks In Anatolia may still 
be Infatuated enough to banish their best friends, but 
in Armenia, when the Turk has gone, the Americans 
will find more than their former field; for, in one 
form or another, Armenia is certain to rise again. 
The Turks have not succeeded in exterminating the 
Armenian nation. Half of it lives in Russia, and its 
colonies are scattered over the world from California 
to Singapore. Even within the Ottoman frontiers the 
extermination is not complete, and the Arabian des- 
erts will yield up their living as well as the memory of 
their dead. The relations of Armenia with the Rus- 
sian democracy should not be more difficult to settle 
than those of Finland and Poland; her frontiers can- 
not be forecast, but they must include the Six Vilayets 
— so often promised reforms by the Concert of 
Europe and so often abandoned to the revenges of the 
Ottoman Government — as well as the Cilician high- 
lands and some outlet to the sea. One thing is cer- 
tain, that, whatever land is restored to them, the 
Armenians will turn its resources to good account, for, 
while their town-dwellers are the merchants and ar- 
tisans of Western Asia, 80 per cent, of them are til- 
lers of the soil. 

* Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p, 309. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 63 

What the Americans have done for Armenia has 
been done for Syria by the French.* There are half 
a million Maronite Catholics in Syria, and since the 
seventeenth century France has been the protectress 
of Catholicism in the Near East. In 1864, when there 
was trouble in Syria and the Maronites were being 
molested by the Ottoman Government, France landed 
an army corps and secured autonomy for the Lebanon 
under a Christian governor. But French influence is 
not limited to the Lebanon province. All over Syria 
there are French clerical, secular, and Judaic schools.' 
Beirut and Damascus, Christian and Moslem — for 
there is more religious tolerance In Syria than in most 
Near Eastern countries — are equally under the spell 
of French civilisation; and France is the chief eco- 
nomic power in the land, for French enterprise has 
built the Syrian railways. The sufferings of Syria 
during the War have been described; the Young Turks 
have confiscated the railways and deprived the Leb- 
anon of Its autonomy; even Rohrbach deprecates the 
fact that "only a few of the higher officials in Syria 
are chosen from among the natives of the country, 
while almost all, from the Kaimakam upwards, are 
sent out from Constantinople," and he attributes to 
this policy "the feeling against the Turks, which is 
most acute in Damascus." This is Rohrbach's peri- 
phrasis for Arab Nationalism, which will be master 
in Its own house when the Turk has been removed. 
The future status and boundaries of Syria can no 
more be forecast than those of Armenia at the pres- 
ent stage of the War; yet here, too, certain tenden- 

* Though the work of the American Presbyterian Mission at 
Beirut must not be forgotten. 



64 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

cies are clear. In some form or other Arab Syria 
will retain her connection with France, and her grow- 
ing population will no longer be driven by misgov- 
ernment to emigration. 

Syrians and Armenians have been emigrating for 
the last quarter of a century, and during the same 
period the Jews, whose birthright in Western Asia is 
as ancient as theirs, have been returning to their na- 
tive land— not because Ottoman dominion bore less 
hardly upon them than upon other gifted races, but 
because nothing could well be worse than the condi- 
tions they left behind. For these Jewish immigrants 
came almost entirely from the Russian Pale, the 
hearth and hell of modern Jewry. The movement 
really began after the assassination of Alexander II. 
in 1 88 1, which threw back reform in Russia for 
thirty-six years. The Jews were the scapegoats of 
the reaction. New laws deprived them of their last 
civil rights, pogroms of life itself; they came to Pales- 
tine as refugees, and between 1881 and 19 14 their 
numbers there increased from 25,000 to 120,000 souls. 
The most remarkable result of this movement has 
been the foundation of flourishing agricultural colon- 
ies. Their struggle for existence has been hard; the 
pioneers were students or trades-folk of the Ghetto, 
unused to outdoor life and ignorant of Near Eastern 
conditions; Baron Edmund de Rothschild financed 
them from 1884 to 1899 at a loss; then they were 
taken over by the ^'Palestine Colonisation Associa- 
tion," which discovered the secrets of success in self- 
government and scientific methods. 

Each colony is now governed by an elective council 
of inhabitants, with committees for education, police, 



TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 65 

and the arbitration of disputes, and they have or- 
ganised co-operative unions which make them Inde- 
pendent of middlemen In the disposal of their produce. 
Their production has rapidly risen In quantity and 
value, through the Industry and Intelligence of the 
average Jewish settler, assisted latterly by an Agri- 
cultural Experiment Station at Atllt, near Haifa, 
which improves the varieties of Indigenous crops and 
acclimatises others.* There is a "Palestine Land 
Development Company" which buys land in big es- 
tates and resells It In small lots to Individual settlers, 
and an "Anglo-Palestine Bank" which makes advances 
to the new settlers when they take up their holdings. 
As a result of this enlightened policy the number of 
colonies has risen to about forty, with 15,000 In- 
habitants In all and 110,000 acres of land, and these 
jfigures do not do full justice to the importance of the 
colonising movement. The 15,000 Jewish agricul- 
turists are only i2j^ per cent, of the Jewish popula- 
tion in Palestine, and 2 per cent, of the total popula- 
tion of the country; but they are the most active, in- 
telligent element, and the only element which is 
rapidly increasing. Again, the land they own is only 
2 per cent, of the total area of Palestine; but It is 
between 8 and 14 per cent, of the area under cultiva- 
tion, and there are vast uncultivated tracts which the 
Jews can and will reclaim, as their numbers grow — 
both by further colonisation and by natural increase, 
for the first generation of colonists have already 
proved their ability to multiply in the Promised Land. 

* See "Zionism and the Jewish Future" (London, 1916: John 
Murray), pp. 138-170; for the agricultural machinery on the Jewish 
National Fund's Model Farm at Ben-Shamen, see the Report of the 
German Vice-Consul at Jaffa for the year 1912. 



66 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

Under this new Jewish husbandry Palestine has be- 
gun to recover its ancient prosperity. The Jews have 
sunk artesian wells, built dams for water storage, 
fought down malaria by drainage and eucalyptus 
planting, and laid out many miles of roads. In 1890 
an acre of irrigable land at Petach-Tikweh, the ear- 
liest colony, was worth £3 12s., in 19 14, £36, and the 
annual trade of Jaffa rose from £760,000 to £2,080,- 
000 between 1904 and 19 12. ''The impetus to agri- 
culture is benefiting the whole economic life of the 
country," wrote the German Vice-Counsul at Jaffa in 
his report for 19 12, and there Is no fear that, as im- 
migration increases, the Arab element will be crowded 
to the wall. There are still only two Jewish colonies 
beyond Jordan, where the Hauran — under the Roman 
Empire a cornland with a dozen cities — has been 
opened up by the railway and is waiting again for 
the plough. 

But will immigration continue now that the Jew 
of the Pale has been turned at a stroke into the free 
citizen of a democratic country? Probably it will 
actually increase, for the Pale has been ravaged as 
well as liberated during the war, and the Jews of Ger- 
many have based an ingenious policy on this prospect, 
which is expounded thus by Dr. Davls-Trietsch of 
Berlin:* 

"According to the most recent statistics about 
12,900,000 out of the 14,300,000 Jews in the world 
speak German or Yiddish {jiidisch-deutsch) as 
their mother-tongue. . . . But its language, 

* "Die Juden der Tiirkei" (Leipzig, 1915: Veit u. Comp.)- 
Pamphlet No. 8 of the Deutsches Vorderasienscomitee's series: "Lander 
U. Volker der Turkei." 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 67 

cultural orientation, and business relations the Jew- 
ish element from Eastern Europe" (the Pale) "is 
an asset to German influence. . . . In a cer- 
tain sense the Jews are a Near Eastern element in 
Germany and a German element in Turkey." 

Germany may not relish her kinship with these 
lost Teutonic tribes, but Dr. Davis-Trietsch makes a 
satirical exposure of such scruples: 

"It used to be a stock argument against the 
Jews that 'all nations' regarded them with equal 
hostility, but the War has brought upon the Ger- 
mans such a superabundance of almost universal 
execration that the question which is the most de- 
spised of all nations — if one goes, not by justice 
and equity, but by the violence and extensiveness 
of the prejudice — might well now be altered to 
the Germans' disadvantage. 

"In this unenviable competition for the prize of 
hate, Turkey, too, has a word to say, for the 'un- 
speakable Turk' is a rhetorical commonplace of 
English politics." 

Having thus isolated the Jews from humanity and 
pilloried them with the German and the Turk, the 
writer expounds their function in the Turco-German 
system : 

"Hitherto Germany has bothered herself very 
little about the Jewish emigration from Eastern 
Europe. People in Germany hardly realised that, 
through the annual exodus of about 100,000 Ger- 
man-speaking Jews to the United States and Eng- 



68 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

land, the empire of the English language and the 
economic system that goes with it is being enlarged, 
while a German asset is being proportionately de- 
preciated. 

"The War found the Jewry of Eastern Europe 
in process of being uprooted, and has enormously 
accelerated the catastrophe. Galicia and the west- 
ern provinces of Russia, which between them con- 
tain many more than half the Jews in the world, 
have suffered more from the War than any other 
region. Jewish homes have been broken up by 
hundreds of thousands, and there is no doubt what- 
ever that, as a result of the War, there will be an 
emigration of East European Jews on an unprec- 
edented scale. 

"The disposal of the East European Jews will 
be a problem for Germany. . . . It will no 
longer do simply to close the German frontiers to 
them, and in view of the difficulties which would 
result from a wholesale migration of Eastern Jews 
Into Germany itself, Germans will only be too glad 
to find a way out in the emigration of these Jews 
to Turkey — a solution extraordinarily favourable 
to the interests of all three parties concerned. . . ." 

And from this he passes to a wider vision: 

"The German-speaking Jews abroad are a kind 
of German-speaking province which is well worth 
cultivation. Nine-tenths of the Jewish world speak 
German, and a good part of the remainder live in 
the Islamic world, which is Germany's friend, so 
that there are grounds for talking of a German 
protectorate over the whole of Jewry." 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 69 

By this exploitation of aversions, Dr. Trietsch ex- 
pects to deposit the Jews of the Pale over Western 
Asia as "culture-manure" for a German harvest; and 
if the Jewish migration to Palestine had remained 
nothing more than a stream of refugees, he might 
possibly have succeeded in his purpose. But in the 
last twenty years this Jewish movement has become 
a positive thing — no longer a flight from the Pale but 
a remembrance of Zion — and Zionism has already 
challenged and defeated the policy which Dr. Trietsch 
represents. "The object of Zionism," it was an- 
nounced in the Basle Programme, drawn up by the 
first Zionist Congress in 1897, "is to establish for the 
Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in 
Palestine." For the Zionists Jewry is a nation, and to 
become like other nations it needs its Motherland. In 
the Jewish colonies in Palestine they see not merely a 
successful social enterprise but the visible symbol of 
a body politic. The foundation of a national univer- 
sity in Jerusalem is as ultimate a goal for them as 
the economic development of the land, and their great- 
est achievement has been the revival of Hebrew as 
the living language of the Palestinian Jews. It was 
this that brought them into conflict with the Ger- 
manising tendency. In 1907 a secondary school was 
successfully started at Jaffa, by the initiative of Jew- 
ish teachers in Palestine, with Hebrew as the language 
of instruction; but in 19 14, when a Jewish Polytechnic 
was founded at Haifa, the German-Jewish Hilfsver- 
eiriy which had taken a leading part, refused to fol- 
low this precedent, and insisted on certain subjects 
being taught in German, not only in the Polytechnic, 
but in the Hilfsverein^s other schools. The result 



70 TURKEY: A FAST AND A FUTURE 

was a secession of pupils and teachers. Purely He- 
brew schools were opened; the Zionist organisation 
gave official support; and the Germanising party was 
compelled to accept a compromise which was in effect 
a victory for the Flebrew language. 

Dr. Trietsch himself accepts this settlement, but 
does not abandon his idea: 

"It was certainly Impossible to expect the Span- 
ish and Arabic-speaking Jews* to submit In their 
own Jewish country to the hegemony of the German 
language . . . Only Hebrew could become 
the common vernacular language of the scattered 
fragments of Jewry drifting back to Palestine from 
all the countries of the world. But ... In addi- 
tion to Hebrew, to which they are more and more 
inclined, the Jews must have a world-language 
{JVeltsprache)^ and this can only be German." 

Anyone acquainted with the language-ordinances 
of Central Europe will feel that this suggestion veils 
a threat. What has been happening in Palestine 
during the War? Dr. Trietsch Informs us that the 
Ottoman Government has been proceeding with the 
"naturalisation" of the Palestinian Jews, and that 
the "local execution of this measure has not been 
effected without disturbances which are beyond the 
province of this pamphlet." One significant conse- 
quence was the appearance in Egypt of Palestinian 
refugees, who raised a Zion mule corps there and 

* The Spanish-speaking Jews in Turkey are descended from 
refugees to whom the Ottoman Government gave shelter in the six- 
teenth century; the Arabic-speaking Jews have been introduced into 
Palestine from the Yemen, by the Zionists, since 1908. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 71 

fought through the Gallipoli campaign. What is the 
outlook for Palestine after the War? If the Otto- 
man pretension survives, the menace from Turkish 
Nationalism* and German resentmentf is grave. But 
if Turk and German go, there are Zionists who would 
like to see Palestine a British Protectorate, with the 
prospect of growing into a British Dominion. Cer- 
tainly, if the Jewish colonies are to make progress, 
they must be relieved of keeping their own police, 
building their own roads, and the other burdens that 
fall on them under Ottoman government, and this can 
only be secured by a better public administration. As 
for the British side of the question, we may consult 
Dr. Trietsch. 

*'There are possibilities," he urges, "in a Ger- 
man protectorate over the Jews as well as over 
Islam. Smaller national units than the 14 1-3 mil- 
lion Jews have been able to do Germany vital in- 
jury or service, and, while the Jews have no na- 
tional state, their dispersion over the whole world, 
their high standard of culture, and their peculiar 

* Dr. Trietsch admits that Jewish colonisation in Palestine was 
retarded because "the leading French and British Jews remained un- 
der the impression of the Armenian massacres" (of 1895-7) "^s pre- 
sented by the anti-Turkish, French and British Press. ... In reality, 
the butcheries of Armenians in Constantinople were a convincing 
proof that the Jews in the Ottoman Empire were safe, for . . . not a 
hair on a Jewish head was touched." One wonders how he will 
exorcise the "impression" of 191 5. 

t As early as 1912 the German Vice-Consul at Jaffa betrayed his 
annoyance at the progress which Zionism was making. He admits in- 
deed that "the falling off in trade last year would have been greater 
still than it was, if the economic penetration of Palestine were not 
reinforced by an idealistic factor in the shape of Zionism;" but he is 
piqued at the "Jewish national vanity" which makes it advisable for 
German firms to display their advertisements in Palestine in the 
Hebrew language and character. 



72 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

abilities lend them a weight that is worth more In 
the balance than many larger national masses which 
occupy a compact area of their own." 

Other Powers than Germany may take these pos- 
sibilities to heart. 

Here, then, are peoples risen from the past to do 
what the Turks cannot and the Germans will not in 
Western Asia. There is much to be done — reform 
of justice, to obtain legal release from the Capitula- 
tions; reform In the assessment and collection of the 
agricultural tithes, which have been denounced for a 
century by every student of Ottoman administration; 
agrarian reform, to save peasant proprietorship, which 
in Syria, at any rate. Is seriously In danger; genuine 
development of economic resources; unsectarlan and 
non-nationalistic advancement of education. But the 
Jews, Syrians, and Armenians are equal to their task, 
and, with the aid of the foreign nations on whom they 
can count, they will certainly accomplish it. The fu- 
ture of Palestine, Syria, and Armenia Is thus assured; 
but there are other countries — once as fertile, pros- 
perous, and populous as they — which have lost not 
only their wealth but their Inhabitants under the Otto- 
man domination. These countries have not the life 
left In them to reclaim themselves, and must look 
abroad for reconstruction. 

If you cross the Euphrates by the bridge that 
carries the Bagdad Railway, you enter a vast land- 
scape of steppes as virgin to the eye as any prairie 
across the Mississippi. Only the tells (mounds) 
with which It Is studded witness to the density of its 
uacient population — for Northern Mesopotamia was 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 73 

once so populous and full of riches that Rome and 
the rulers of Iran fought seven centuries for its pos- 
session, till the Arabs conquered it from both. 

The railway has now reached NIsibIn, the Roman 
frontier fortress heroically defended and ceded in 
bitterness of heart, and runs past Dara, which the 
Persians never took. Westward lies Urfa — named 
Edessa by Alexander's men after their Macedonian 
city of running waters;* later the seat of a Christian 
Syriac culture whose missionaries were heard In China 
and Travancore; still famous, under Arab dominion, 
for Its Veronica and 300 churches; and restored for 
a moment to Christendom as the capital of a Crusader 
principality, till the Mongols trampled It into oblivion 
and the Osmanlis made It a name for butchery. 

From Urfa to Nisibin there can be fields again. 
The climate has not changed, and wherever the Bed- 
awi pitches his tents and scratches the ground there 
Is proof of the old fertility. Only anarchy has ban- 
ished cultivation; for, since the Ottoman pretension 
was established over the land. It has been the battle- 
ground of brigand tribes — Kurds from the hills and 
Arabs from the desert, skirmishing or herding their 
flocks, making or breaking alliance, but always rob- 
bing any tiller of the land of the fruits of his labour. 

"If once," Dr. Rohrbach prophesies, "the peas- 
ant population were sure of its life and property. 
It would joyfully expand, push out Into the desert, 
and bring new land under the plough; In a few 
years the villages would spring up, not by dozens, 
but by hundreds." 

* Edessa from Thracian ^eStJ == Slavonic voda. 



74 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

At present cultivation is confined to the Armenian 
foot-hills — an uncertain arc of green from Aleppo to 
Mosul. But the railway strikes boldly into the de- 
serted middle of the land, giving the arc a chord, 
and when Turco-German strategic interests no longer 
debar it from being linked up, through Aleppo, with 
a Syrian port, it will be the really valuable section 
of the Bagdad system. The railway is the only cap- 
ital enterprise that Northern Mesopotamia requires, 
for there is rain sufficient for the crops without arti- 
ficial irrigation. Reservoirs of population are the 
need. The Kurds who come for winter pasture may 
be induced to stay — already they have been settling 
down in the western districts, and have gained a repu- 
tation for industry; the Bedawin, more fickle hus- 
bandmen, may settle southward along the Euphrates, 
and in time there will be a surplus of peasantry from 
Armenia and Syria. These will add field to field, 
but unless some stronger stream of immigration is 
led into the land, it will take many generations to re- 
cover its ancient prosperity; for in the ninth century 
A.D. Northern Mesopotamia paid Harun-al-Rashid as 
great a revenue as Egypt, and its cotton commanded 
the market of the world.* 

Southern Mesopotamia — the Irak of the Arabs 
and Babylonia of the -Greeks — lies desolate like the 
North, but is a contrast to it in every other respect. 
Its aspect is towards the Persian Gulf, and Rohrbach 
grudgingly admits f that down the Tigris to Basra, 
and not upstream to Alexandretta, is the natural chan- 



* Muslin is named after Mosul, and cotton itself (in Greek, Latin, 
Arabic, and Turkish) bombyx or bambuk, after Bambyke (Mumbij). 
t "Bagdadbahn," p. 38. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 75 

nel for its trade. It gets nothing from the Mediter- 
ranean, neither trade nor rain, and every drop of 
water for cultivation must be led out of the rivers; 
but the rivers in their natural state are worse than 
the drought. Their discharge is extremely variable — - 
about eight times as great in April as in October; 
they are always silting up their beds and scooping 
out others; and when there are no men to interfere 
they leave half the country a desert and make the 
other half a swamp. Yet the soil, when justly wa- 
tered, is one of the richest in the world; for Irak is 
an immense alluvial delta, more than five hundred 
miles from end to end, which the Tigris and Eu- 
phrates have deposited in what was originally the head 
of the Persian Gulf. The Arabs call it the Sawdd or 
Black Land, and it is a striking change from the bare 
ledges of Arabia and Iran which enclose its flanks, 
and from the Northern steppe-land which it suddenly 
replaces — at Samarra, if you are descending the 
Tigris, and on the Euphrates at Hit. The 
steppe cannot compare with the Sawdd in fer- 
tility, but the Sawdd does not so readily yield up its 
wealth. To become something better than a wilder- 
ness of dust and slime it needs engineering on the 
grand scale and a mighty population — immense forces 
working for immense returns. In a strangely differ- 
ent environment it anticipated our modern rhythm of 
life by four thousand years, and then went back to 
desolation five centuries before Industrialism (which 
may repeople it) began. 

The Sawdd was first reclaimed by men who had 
already a mastery of metals, a system of writing, and 
a mature religion — less civilised men would never 



•76 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

have attempted the task. These Sumerians, In the 
fourth millennium B.C., lived on tells heaped up above 
flood-level, each tell a city-state with its separate gov- 
ernment and gods, for centralisation was the one 
thing needful to the country which the Sumerians did 
not achieve. The centralisers were Semites from the 
Arabian plateau. Sargon of Akkad and Naram Sin 
ruled the whole Sawdd as early as 2500 B.C.; Ham- 
murabi, In 1900, already ruled it from Babylon; and 
the capital has never shifted more than sixty miles 
since then. Babylon on the Euphrates and Bagdad 
on the Tigris are the alternative points from which 
the Sawdd can be controlled. Just above them the 
first Irrigation canals branch off from the rivers, and 
between them the rivers approach within thirty-five 
miles of each other. It is the point of vantage for 
government and engineering. 

Here far-sighted engineers and stronghanded rulers 
turned the waters of Babylon into waters of life, and 
the Sawdd became a great heart of civilisation, breath- 
ing In man-power — Sumerians and Amorltes and Kas- 
sltes and Aramasans and Chaldeans and Persians and 
Greeks and Arabs — and breathing out the works of 
man — grain and wool and Babylonish garments. In- 
ventions still used In our machine-shops, and emotions 
still felt In our religion. 

"The land,'* writes Herodotus,* who saw It In 
its prime, "has a little rain, and this nourishes 
the corn at the root; but the crops are matured and 
brought to harvest by water from the river — not, 
as In Egypt, by the river flooding over the fields, 

♦Book I., ch. 193. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 77 

but by human labour and shadufs."^ For Baby- 
lonia, like Egypt, is one network of canals, the 
largest of which is navigable. It is far the best 
corn-land of all the countries I know. There is no 
attempt at arboriculture — figs or vines or olives — 
but it is such superb corn-land that the average 
yield is two-hundredfold, and three-hundredfold in 
the best years. The wheat and barley there are a 
good four inches broad in the blade, and millet 
and sesame grow as big as trees — but I will not 
state the dimensions I have ascertained, because 
I know that, for anyone who has not visited Baby- 
lonia and witnessed these facts about the crops for 
himself, they would be altogether beyond belief." 

Harnessed in the irrigation channels, the Tigris 
and Euphrates had become as mighty forces of pro- 
duction as the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtse and 
the Hoang-Ho. 

"This," Horodotus adds,f "is the best demon- 
stration I can give of the wealth of the Babylonians : 
All the lands ruled by the King of Persia are 
assessed, in addition to their taxes in money, for 
the maintenance of the King's household and army 
in kind. Under this assessment the King is main- 
tained for four months out of the twelve by Baby- 
lonia, and for the remaining eight by the rest of 
Asia together, so that in wealth the Assyrian prov- 
ince is equivalent to a third of all Asia." 

* Cp. Sir William Willcocks. "The Irrigation of Mesopotamia," 
p. 5 (London, 1911: Spon). 
tBook I., ch. 192. 



78 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

The *'Asia" over which the Achaemenids ruled 
included Russian Central Asia and Egypt as well as 
modern Turkey and Persia, and Egypt, under the 
same assessment, merely maintained the local Persian 
garrison.* Its money contribution was inferior too 
— 700 talents as compared with Assyria's 1,000; and 
though these figures may not be conclusive, because 
the Persian "province of Assyria" probably extended 
over the northern steppes as well as the Sawdd, it is 
certain that under the Arab Caliphate, when Irak and 
Egypt were provinces of one empire for the second 
time in history, Irak by itself paid 135 million dirhems 
(francs) annually into Harun-al-Rashid's treasury and 
Egypt no more than 6^ million, so that a thousand 
years ago the productiveness of the Sawdd was more 
than double that of the Nile. 

Another measure of the land's capacity is the 
greatness of its cities. Herodotus gives statistics! 
of Babylon in the fifth century B.C. — walls 300 feet 
high, 75 feet broad, and 58 miles in circuit; three- 
and four-storied houses laid out in blocks; broad 
straight streets intersecting one another at regular 
intervals, at right angles or parallel to the Euphrates. 
Any one who reads Herodotus' description of Baby- 
lon or Ibn Serapion's of Bagdad, and considers that 
these vast urban masses were merely centres of collec- 
tion and distribution for the open country, can infer 
the density of population and intensity of cultivation 
over the face of the Sawdd. When the Caliph Omar 
conquered Irak from the Persians in the middle of the 
seventh century A.D., and took an Inventory of what 

* Herodotus Book III., ch. 91. 
t Book I., chs. 178-183. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE , 79 

he had acquired, he found that there were 5,000,000 
hectares* of land under cultivation, and that the poll- 
tax was paid by 550,000 householders, which implies 
a total population, in town and country, of more than 
5,000,000 souls, where a bare million and a half main- 
tains itself to-day in city alleys and nomads' tents. 

And in Omar's time the Sawad was no longer at 
its best, for, a few years before the Arab conquest, 
abnormally high floods had burst the dykes; from 
below Hilla to above Basra the Euphrates broadened 
into a swamp, and the Tigris deserted its former 
(and present) bed for the Shatt-el-Hai, leaving the 
Amara district a desert. The Persian Government, 
locked in a suicidal struggle with Rome, was 
powerless to make good the damage, and the shock 
of the Arab invasion made it irreparable. t Under 
the Abbasid Caliphs of Bagdad the rest of the country 
preserved its prosperity, but in the thirteenth cen- 
tury Hulaku the Mongol finished the work of the 
floods, and under Ottoman dominion the Sawdd has 
not recovered. 

Can it still be reclaimed? Surveys have been taken 
by Sir William Willcocks, as Adviser to the Ottoman 
Ministry of Public Works, and his final conclusions 
and proposals are embodied in a report drawn up at 
Bagdad in 191 i.J 

*'The Tigris-Euphrates delta," he writes, "may 
be classed as an arid region of some 5,000,000 hec- 

* A hectare is approximately equal to two and a half acres. 

t "The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate," by Guy le Strange 
(Cambridge, 1905: at the University Press), pp. 25-9. 

^ "The Irrigation of Mesopotamia," by Sir William Willcocks, 
K.C.M.G., F.R.G.S. (London, 1911: Spon). The report is dated Bag- 
dad, March 26th, 191 1. 



80 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

tares. . . . All this land Is capable of easy 
levelling and reclamation. The presence of 15 per 
cent, lime In the soil renders reclamation very easy 
compared with similar work In the dense clays of 
Egypt. One Is never far away from the giant banks 
of old canals and the ruins of ancient towns." 

But he does not expect to make all these 5,000,- 
000 hectares productive simultaneously, as they are 
said to have been when Omar took his Inventory. "It 
is water, not land, which measures production," and 
he reckons that the average combined discharge of the 
rivers would Irrigate 3,000,000 hectares In winter, 
and In summer 400,000 of rice or 1,250,000 of other 
crops. This Is the eventual maximum; for Immediate 
reclamation he takes 1,410,000 hectares In hand. His 
project Is practically to restore, with technical Im- 
provements, the ancient system of canals and drains, 
using the Euphrates water to irrigate everything west 
of the Tigris (down to Kut) and the Shatt-el-Hal, 
and the water of the Tigris and its tributaries for dis- 
tricts east of that line. Adding 33 per cent, for con- 
tingencies to his estimate for cost of materials and 
rates of labour, and doubling the total to cover In- 
terest on loans and subsequent development, he ar- 
rives at £29,105,020 (Turkish)* as the cost, from 
first to last, of Irrigation and agricultural works to- 
gether; and he estimates that the 1,410,000 hectares 
reclaimed by this outlay will produce crops to the 
value of £9,070,000 (Turkish) a year. In other 
words, the annual return on the gross expenditure will 

* £1.00 Turkish = approximately £0.90 sterling. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 81 

be more than 31 per cent., and under the present tithe 
system £7,256,000 (Turkish) of this will remain with 
the owners of the soil, while £1,814,000 will pass to 
the Government. This will give the country itself a 
net return of 24 19 per cent, on the combined gross cost 
of irrigation and agricultural works, while the Gov- 
ernment, after paying away £443,000 (Turkish) out 
of its tithes for maintenance charges, will still receive 
a clear 9 per cent, per annum on the gross cost of Ir- 
rigation, to which its share In the outlay will be con- 
fined. 

Unquestionably, therefore, the enterprise is ex- 
ceedingly profitable to all parties concerned. Looking 
further ahead. Sir William proposes to supersede the 
navigation of the Tigris * by railways, and so set free 
the whole discharge of the two rivers for irrigation. 
He contemplates handling annually 375,000 tons of 
cereals and 1,250,000 cwt. of cotton, and estimates 
the future by the effects of the Chenab Canal In North- 
ern India — 

"a canal traversing lands similar to those of 
Mesopotamia in their climate and in the condition 
in which they found themselves before the canal 
works were carried out. ... In such a land, 
so like a great part of Mesopotamia, canals have 
introduced in a few years nearly a million of in- 
habitants, and the resurrection of the country has 
been so rapid that its very success was jeopardised 
by a railway not being able to be made quickly 
enough to transport the enormous produce." 

* In his immediate project he intends to keep the Tigris navig- 
able, and allots £48,350 (Turkish) for its improvement. 



82 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

*'A million of inhabitants" — -that is the crux of 
the problem. Labour is as necessary as water for 
the raising of crops; Sir William's barrages and canals 
without hands to turn them to account would be a 
dead loss instead of a profitable investment; but from 
what reservoir of population is this man-power to be 
introduced? The German economists are baffled by 
the difficulty. 

"It Is useless," as Rohrbach puts it, "to sink 
from 150 to 600 million marks In restoring the 
canal system, and then let the land lie idle, with 
all its new dams and channels, for lack of cultiva- 
tors. Yet Turkey can never raise enough settlers 
for Irak by Internal colonisation." * 

She cannot raise them even for the minor enter- 
prises at Konia and Adana,f and evidently the Sawdd 
must draw Its future cultivators from somewhere be- 
yond the bounds of Western Asia. From Germany, 
many Germans have suggested; but German experts 
curtly dismiss the Idea. The first point Rohrbach 
makes In his book on the Bagdad Railway is that Ger- 
man colonisation In Anatolia Is Impossible for political 
reasons. "No worse service," he declares, "can be 
done to the German cause In the East than the propa- 
gation of this idea," and the rise of Turkish Na- 
tionalism has proved him right.f There remain the 
Arab lands ; 

"But even," he continues, "if the Turks thought 
of foreign colonisation In Syria and Mesopotamia* 

* Cp. W^iedenfeld, pp. 62-4. 
t"Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 57, 61. 
iCp. Wiedenfeld, p. 64. 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 83 

to hold the Arabs in check" (the poHtlcal factor 
again), "that would be little help to us Germans, 
for only very limited portions of those countries have 
a climate in which Germans can work on the land or 
perform any kind of heavy manual labour." 

And Germany herself is hard up for men. 

"For all prospective developments in Turkey," 
writes Dr. Trietsch, "not merely scientific knowl- 
edge, capital, and organisation are wanted, but men, 
and Germany has no resources in men worth speak- 
ing of for opening up the Islamic world." 

It Is one of his arguments for bringing in the 
Jews, but the colonisation of Palestine will leave no 
Jews over for Irak. Rohrbach* disposes of the Mou- 
hadjirs — they are a drop in the bucket, and are no 
more adapted to the climate than the Germans them- 
selves. "There is really nothing for it," he bursts 
out in despair, "but the introduction of Mohammedans 
from other countries where the climatic conditions of 
Irak prevail." 

That narrows the field to India and Egypt, and 
drives Turco-German policy upon the horns of a 
dilemma : 

"The colonists must either remain subjects of 
a foreign Power, a solution which could not be con- 
sidered for an instant by any Turkish Government, 
or else they must become Turkish subjects — " 

a condition which, to Indians and Egyptians, as well 
as Germans, would be prohibitive. No one who has 

* "Bagdadbahn," p. 83; cp. Trietsch, p. 11. 



84 TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 

known good government would exchange it for Otto 
man government without the Capitulations as a guar- 
antee. 

The Ottoman Government has its own character- 
istic view. In a memorandum on railways and recla- 
mation, published by the Ministry of Public Works 
in 1909, a resume is given of the Willcocks scheme. 

"In due time/* the memorandum proceeds, "a 
comprehensive scheme for the whole of Mesopo- 
tamia must be carried out, but, apart from the 
question of expense, it is clear that the public works 
involved will not be justified until Turkey is in a 
position to colonise these extensive districts, and 
this question cannot be considered till we have suc- 
ceeded in getting rid of the Capitulations.'* 

This is the Ottoman pretension. Egypt, rid of the 
Osmanli, and India, where he never ruled, have kept 
their ancient wealth of harvests and population, and 
have man-power to spare for the reclamation of the 
Sawdd. All the means are at hand for bringing the 
land to life — the water, the engineer, the capital, the 
labour; only the Ottoman pretension stands in the way, 
and condemns the Sawdd to lie dead and unharvested 
so long as it endures. 

**The last voyage I made before coming to this 
country," wrote Sir William Willcocks at Bagdad 
in 191 1, 'Vas up the Nile, from Khartum to the 
great equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and 
forbidden region I was filled with pride to think that 
I belonged to a race whose sons, even in this in- 



TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE 65 

hospitable waste of waters, were struggling in the 
face of a thousand discouragements to introduce 
new forest trees and new agricultural products and 
ameliorate in some degree the conditions of life of 
the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should 
I have felt if, in traversing the deserts and swamps 
which to-day represent what was the richest and 
most famous tract of the world, I had thought that 
I was a scion of a race in whose hands God had 
placed, for hundreds of years, the destinies of this 
great country, and that my countrymen could give 
no better account of their stewardship than the exhi- 
bition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts 
to waste themselves in the sea for nine months in the 
year, and desolating everything in their way for the 
remaining three? No effort that Turkey can make" 
■ — she was then still mistress of the Sawdd — *'can be 
too great to roll away the reproach of these parched 
and weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven." 

Turkey, which claims the present in Western Asia, 
is nothing but an overthrow of the past and an obstruc- 
tion of the future. 



BUL<| 






^ 



>LA °?"^ "^" 




THE NEARER EAST 

Land Surface Features 

(Based on map in D.C. Hogarth's "The Nearer East") 
English Miles 



I I Cultivated and auailable for cultiuatn 

l__^_l Steppe partly available for cultwati, 

l_-_-J Steppe Desert 

I I (Titer desert 

I I Mn,jnta!n uegetation 



I f r 



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